u/beatdom_journal

>Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
--Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this in a letter to Edie Parker in January 1957. He continues:

>That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens [...] I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.

This appears in Selected Letters, Vol 2, edited by Ann Charters. It’s on pages 7-8.

Kerouac was indeed a gentle soul who practised kindness in pursuit of heaven on Earth but found a cold and unkind world that pushed him further into alcoholism rather than the more idealised isolation he mentions in this letter. The pressures of fame and the cruelty of a sensationalist media also severely impacted him following the release of "On the Road" in late 1957.

The photo is of Kerouac and a cat. I am unsure of the photographer but it seems to come from the Orange County Regional History Center. It seems to be taken outside his Orlando home, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

This is a journal entry from 1948. It can be found in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (p.257).
The full context is:

>Universe as an animal, a maze of god as the one layer of forces around the cosmos. Each shift of atoms on his level changes quillions of atoms in the shaft.
There is a center to the universe perhaps. The problem of infinity has haunted me since childhood.
Haunt: means that we know the answer to what we consciously think our problem to be, but will not yet recognize or be aware of it.
I cannot write well because I cannot put my whole being into it.
Poetry must haunt the mind.

The word “haunt” is underlined in the final line.
I am not sure who took this photo. It seems to have been taken for the poster to promote the 1993 film, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, by Jerry Aronson.

This is from a relatively famous letter from Burroughs to Kerouac, in which Burroughs says much on the subject of Buddhism. When we think of Buddhism and the Beats, we tend to think of Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, di Prima, Kandel, Kyger… but not so much Burroughs. He wrote to Kerouac to say he had studied it but that “Buddhism is only for the West to study as history, that is it is a subject for understanding and Yoga can profitably be practiced to that end. But it is not, for the West, an Answer, not a Solution.” Burroughs goes on to criticise any Buddhist attempt to “remove love” from life and calls it “a form of psychic junk.” He is particularly critical of Western Buddhists and concludes: “Buddhism is not for the West. We must evolve our own solutions.”

The letter is dated August 18, 1954. It can be found in “The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959,” p.226-227.

Notice the similarity in sentiment to another great Burroughs quote, this one also from a letter to Kerouac, written a few months earlier, on May 24, 1954:

"I say we are here in human form to learn by the human hieroglyphs of love and suffering. There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve."

This one has been going around social media lately attributed to Allen Ginsberg, but it is definitely a Burroughs quote. It is from the same book, p.213.

Photo by Tony Bock