Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 19

IN MY ROOM I LOOKED AT MY SUITCASE SO CLEVERLY packed for this big trip the idea of which began all the previous winter in Florida reading Voltaire, Chateaubriand, de Montherlant (whose latest book was even now displayed in the shop-windows of Paris, “The Man Who Travels Alone is a Devil”)—Studying maps, planning to walk all over, eat, find my ancestors’ home town in the Library and then go to Brittany where it was and where the sea undoubtedly washed the rocks—My plan being, after five days in Paris, go to that inn on the sea in Finistère and go out at midnight in raincoat, rain hat, with notebook and pencil and with large plastic bag to write inside of, i.e., stick hand, pencil and notebook into bag, and write dry, while rain falls on rest of me, write the sounds of the sea, part two of poem “Sea” to be entitled: “SEA, Part Two, the Sounds of the Atlantic at X, Brittany,” either at outside of Carnac, or Concarneau, or Pointe de Penmarch, or Douardenez, or Plouzaimedeau, or Brest, or St. Malo—There in my suitcase, the plastic bag, the two pencils, the extra leads, the notebook, the scarf, the sweater, the raincoat in the closet, and the warm shoes—

The warm shoes indeed, I’d also brought Florida air-conditioned shoes anticipating long hotsun walks in Paris and hadnt worn them once, the “warm shoes” were all I wore the whole blessed time—In the Paris papers people were complaining about the solid month of rain and cold throughout late-May and early-June France as being caused by scientists tampering with the weather.

And my first aid kit, and my mittens for the cold midnight musings on the Breton shore when the writing’s done, and all fancy sports shirts and extra socks I never even got to wear in Paris let alone London where I’d also planned to go, not to mention Amsterdam and Cologne afterwards.

I was already homesick.

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how “successful” your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.

As usual I was simply concentrating everything in one intense but thousandéd “Ah-ha!”