“
I’ve all these two days spent filing old letters, taking them out of old envelopes, clipping the pages together, putting them away . . . hundreds of old letters from Allen, Burroughs, Cassady, enuf to make you cry the enthusiasms of younger men . . . how bleak we become. And fame kills all. Someday ¨The Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac¨ will make America cry.
[— Jack Kerouac, in a letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, May 25, 1961]
”
― Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
― Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
“
The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization.
...more
”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
