Transcendence

I have always found peace in tombstones, and I still haven't seen one with an advertisement on it. You can find an interesting piece on the most "literary" graveyards here; most of them are in Europe, but we've got Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, which houses the remains of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Haven't read Emerson's powerful essay "Self Reliance?" The full text is here, or you can get the Dover Thrift edition for a dollar. Either way, read it; it will transform how you view your own mind.

While you're in that neck of the woods contemplating mortality and free will, drop into Lowell's Edson Cemetery and pay your respects to Jack Kerouac. I've done so several times, and I'm always profoundly moved by his simple stone. (And by the way, if all you've read is On the Road, you don't know Kerouac. Read Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, and Visions of Gerard, and then tell me he was a hedonistic hack.)

Kerouac's great achievement lies not in his carefully crafted classic (in the tradition of Huck Finn and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise), On the Road; it's to be found, instead, in the pure expressive prose of his panreligious writings and in his intense confessionalism, conditioned as they both are by the paradoxical view of reality implied by Buddhism.

Kerouac gazed into the mirror and was blinded; but he left his visions behind for us. I can't imagine a greater sacrifice.