Word: beatness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Missionary zeal once beat strong in Judaism; the Pharisees, said Jesus, would "compass sea and land to make one proselyte" (Matthew 23:15). This proselytizing urge vanished in the Diaspora, but the time may have come to compass land and sea again. So thinks Robert Gordis, professor of Bible at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary and of religion at Columbia University...
...life novels, although First Novelist Birmingham explores the parqueted upper depths of the well-heeled while Novelist Kerouac, author of On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16), roams the squalid lower depths of just plain heels. Each book purports to speak for a younger generation that Kerouac has dubbed "beat" and Birmingham, with Fitzgeraldian effulgence, likes to think of as "blazing...
...view, these are seen as evil escape mechanisms to evade reality, or accepted as strange techniques for intensifying reality. Primed with tea (marijuana) or benny (Benzedrine), the "kicks" of ecstasy become the "flips" of madness. Virtually all the characters in The Subterraneans flip. But Author Kerouac has known beat characters to do a reverse flip: "The hero of On the Road is now a normal settled-down adult. He's a railroad conductor with three kids. I've seen him put the kids to bed, kneel down and say the Lord's Prayer, and then maybe...
...roaring gunshot spectral immortality B movie tire pile black-in-the-mist Wild-america but it's a crazy world!" In one sense, Author Kerouac's dithyrambic denial of mind may be salutary in an age that overrationalizes and overanalyzes existence. But if the concept of the beat generation can be reduced to its philosophical origins, it is simply U.S.-style existentialism. The Subterraneans, in its tawdry, slapdash way, testifies to one of Kierkegaard's precepts: "Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced...
Jack Kerouac is mightily busy experiencing. He says he has ten books on tap to follow The Subterraneans, and the chief spokesman of the beat generation may soon make his mark in other fields. Says he: "I promised God a month of meditation in the woods or in the desert if the movies buy On the Road...