NOVEMBER 3
Jack Kerouac Photo: © John Cohen
June 16, 1947
Just made one of those great grim decisions of one's life--not to present my manuscript to any publisher until I've completed it, all 380,000-odd words of it. This means seven months of ascetic gloom and labor--although doubt is no longer my devil, just sadness now. I think I will get this immense work done much sooner this way, to face up to it and finish it. Past two years has been work done in a preliminary mood, a mood of beginning and not completing. To complete anything is a horror, is an insult to life, but the work of life needs to get done and art is work--what work!! It is sorrowful to know that this is not the age for such art. This is an excluding age in art...but so what. All I want from this book is a living, all I want is enough.
--Jack Kerouac--
Jack Kerouac Photo: © John Cohen
June 16, 1947
Just made one of those great grim decisions of one's life--not to present my manuscript to any publisher until I've completed it, all 380,000-odd words of it. This means seven months of ascetic gloom and labor--although doubt is no longer my devil, just sadness now. I think I will get this immense work done much sooner this way, to face up to it and finish it. Past two years has been work done in a preliminary mood, a mood of beginning and not completing. To complete anything is a horror, is an insult to life, but the work of life needs to get done and art is work--what work!! It is sorrowful to know that this is not the age for such art. This is an excluding age in art...but so what. All I want from this book is a living, all I want is enough.
--Jack Kerouac--
posted by Left-handed Trees... at 4:07 PM
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