"the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

Kerouac lived life like one continual jazz solo. And his writing simply reflected his lifestyle. You could almost say that it grew organically out of his own need for constant, no-holds-barred adventure.

In On the Road, Kerouac recounts a real-life road trip he took with his friend. And he turns it into "high art." But the kind of rebellious, stream-of-consciousness "high art" that's been typed out on one very long piece of paper, in one sitting.

Crazy indeed.

Kerouac isn't talking about the American dream here. He's talking about people who are mad to experience life away from anything common. This life's all about doing whatever you want. Eat when you get hungry. Talk about what comes into your head as soon as it comes into you head. Write whatever you're thinking about.

In this passage, Kerouac is basically describing both the kind of person he was, and the kind of person he liked to hang out with. He could not sit still. He wanted freedom.

So, the recklessness of the spontaneous road trip, the ability to live completely outside the confines of work and family—that's what he was aiming at. The freedom to burn, burn, burn. Not the Constitutional-type freedom of holding a 9-5 and paying the bills, bills, bills.

This passage shows just how much jazz influenced the Beat writers. It's a single run-on sentence, cut into short phrases, some of which are repeated: "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved." Then there's the quick choppy beat of this three-peat: "burn, burn, burn."

Varied rhythms and repetition? Seems quite jazzy to us. Maybe we're going off the rails a little bit here, but we think this passage sounds almost like a sax solo. It makes us want to get up on our feet and dance.

But anyway. Clearly, Kerouac's text doesn't care about the rules of proper sentence length or punctuation. He cares about momentum and the musical free-flow of language. That's why he let it spill directly from his brain and onto the paper.

Well, we're guessing his hands were involved in actually pounding the keys of the typewriter. But you got what we meant. Right? Jeez, what can some writers do to get a little appreciation for a metaphor over here?