On The Road

I don't know about you but sometimes when I finish reading a book I experience a real sense of loss. I guess occasionally it's a loss that is part of the story, othertimes a farewell to characters you've grown attached too, but also sometimes for me it is that I'll never be able to discover that book again.
I remember my brother in law realising I'd not read the Narnia books buying them for me and saying he envied my discovery afresh.
I've been very late coming to it, but just finished Jack Kerouacs "On the Road" last night. The book moved me in all kinds of ways. Externally the lifestyle and choices of the characters certainly didn't resonate with me, but the urge to be journeying but always on the way home, the conceptualisation of journey as something romantic, urgent and necessary are things i recognise. There were literay things about it that made me breathless and smile - those riffs of words as the jazz and bop was playing and playing transcended the words themselves I'll never forget and will probably reread one day just to hear them again, though not for the first time.
It intruges me that a book written before I was born feels to hold contemporary themes.
This morning I fancied a long road trip, but I've got tea to cook later, so I made do with a long run on the moor up past the 12 Apostle Stones along the ridge and on and on and then back home.

"As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven." Jack Kerouac On The Road