Dharma of Despair and Matterhorn

I like to see that everyone else that are quoting Dharma Bums are pulling the same quotes that I've highlighted in my own book, it feels like I'm on the right track then. There is one quote I particularly liked, however, towards the end of the book:

"Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved? But cold morning would return... Where would it all lead to but some sweet golden eternity, to prove that we've all been wrong, to prove that the proving itself was nil..." (pg 239-240)

Throughout the novel, Kerouac's character Ray is torn in trying to find a balance between the Catholicism of his youth and the Buddhist nature that he identifies strongly with, which Japhy (Snyder) helps him to discover. He attempts to abstain from sex, contemplates abstaining from alcohol, gets caught in the sorrowful undertones of Buddhism, and seeks out some semblance of meaning and connection among friends and family. This passage is from the final stretch of his stay in Washington, on Mt. Despair (aptly named) before returning to civilization. Within it he combines Christianity and Buddhist beliefs, in that we are all angelic beings - like Ginsberg's angel-headed hipsters and other symbolic images of the Beat movement ascribed to the free, holy, and optimistic youth - but that suffering is eternal, a basic tenet within Buddhism, and a constant reminder if the immaterialness of perceived reality. Again a golden eternity comes into his mind, an image of heaven or at least a blissful Nirvana, but also he has an understanding that the drive he and Japhy have had together to show other people that their lives are wrong, that something is missing in their daily dry routines, is itself an exercise in futility when all is nothing. This is an echo from a passage much earlier in the book, at the summit of Matterhorn, as Ray (Kerouac) looks between himself, Japhy, and Henry:

"Now there's the karma of these three men here: Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountaintop and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet lyin' down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they'll never get me up here again" (pg 84).

In sum, Kerouac is stating that one can push hard to prove something, fail and be miserable, or succeed and rejoice, but in the end the proving was nothing, and gains one nothing - the wisest choice of all is to find where one is happy in life, and be at that happiness.

- Karl