"...Anyway I wrote the book because we're all going to die. In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid with just this one pride and consolation. My heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the lord. I made a supplication in this dream.
So in the last page of on the road I describe how the hero Dean Moriarty is coming to see me all the way from the west coast just for a day or two. We just been back and forth across the country several times in cars and now our adventures are over. We're still great friends, but we have to go into later fazes of our lives. So there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walking off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again, gone.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Mor-i-arty.."
And here is a preview to the new film which, by most accounts, stays true to the book and captures the essence of what On The Road is about. (Although one review said Mary Lou features much more, except it works. I dunno, only reporting what I have read)..
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