Burning up and growing old

Kerouac, DeLillo and the fire of life

It comes toward the beginning of “On the Road,” as close to the summary of the dissertation that you can hope to piece out of this literary grad student’s rambling opus.

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

The maddest one of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel being Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady).

Four decades later, in 1997, Don DeLillo released his masterpiece “Underworld,” and his style owes much to the Beats, though the delivery of his prose is more deliberate, more calculating.

The companion quote comes, by design, toward the end of the novel this time, after the main character Nick Shay has a moment to look back on how far he has come since the young man he once was, since the “mad one” he no longer is.

I’ll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn or a fuck or a farthing. I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.