Ryan's Book Review: The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard, The Void

One Fast Move or I'm Gone (2009)

Synopsis: Kerouac's alter ego Ray Smith hangs around with Japhy Ryder a.k.a. Gary Snyder, spreading the Dharma to the West by being hobos and proto-hippies.

Review: First of all, I can't believe they haven't made a movie of this yet.  Next of all, I originally read this book back in college because it's kind of obligatory to read Jack Kerouac stuff when you're in college.  I told myself I really liked it then, and I've always known that I preferred it to On the Road.  I don't know why, but a few weeks ago I decided to download it and read it again, which I did on flights to and from New York.

Holy crap I did not understand this book when I originally read it back in college.  Back then, I really didn't know what Dharma was, or probably even what it meant.  I got all the hippie-wanderlust-nature stuff, I guess, but the Buddhist stuff all went way, way, way over my head.  I mean, it still probably goes over my head, but not nearly as far over my head as it did back then.  Just...wow.  In my mind, the book was always about nature and friendship, which I guess it really is, but now, I can't help but wonder stuff like this meant to my stupid, naive, self-righteous 21 year old self:

"Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence.  Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all."

After reading a bunch of Buddhist stuff for the last few years and then re-reading this book, I've decided that I still like this book, and in more than just the obligatory way that I've always liked Jack Kerouac.

One weird thing was that I felt guilty for reading it on a machine instead of reading a real book, but at exactly the same time, I was ticked that I couldn't download more of Gary Snyder's stuff to my machine right then at that very second.  That was some deep existential crisis cognitive dissonance shit, right there, I tell you.

Anyways, if you haven't already, you should really read this book, not just because it's kind of obligatory, but because it's a pretty good read as long as you are anybody but my dumbass 21 year old  self (even then you'll like it, but mostly for the wrong reasons).  It's got some pretty good east meets west stuff, some good "I'm American and want to be Buddhist" stuff, some good "Christianity and Buddhism are pretty much the same thing" stuff, and some good hippie-I-need-to-spend-more-time-in-the-mountains stuff.