Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Page B

without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesnt matter, and his accomplishment will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven’s last quartets and Boito’s Requiem—Churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on the map of the West, idiot kings wil burp at bones, nobody’ll care then the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void wont care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile—That “secret God-grin” but what a God is this who didn’t invent justice?—So they’ll light candles and make speeches and the angels rage. Ah but “I dont know, I dont care, and it doesnt matter” will be the final human prayer—
    Meanwhile in all directions, in and out, of the universe, outward to the neverending planets in never ending space (more numerous than the sands in the ocean) and inward into the illimitable vastnesses of your own body which is also never ending space and “planets” (atoms) (all an electromagnetic crazy arrangement of bored eternal power) meanwhile the murder and the useless activity goes on, and has been going on since beginningless time, and will go on never endingly, and all we can know, we with our justified hearts, is that it is just what it is and no more than what it is and has no name and is but beastly power—
    For those who believe in a personal God who cares about good and bad are hallucinating themselves beyond the shadow of a doubt, tho God bless them, he blankly blesses blanks anyway—
    It’s just nothing but Infinity infinitely variously amusing itself with a movie, empty space and matter both, it doesnt limit itself to either one, infinitude wants all—
    But I did think on the mountain, “Well” (and passing the little mound where I’d buried the mouse every day as I went to my filthy defecations) “let us keep the mind neutral, let us be like the void”—but as soon as I get bored and come down the mountain I cant for the life of me be anything but enraged, lost, partial, critical, mixed-up, scared, foolish, proud, sneering, shit shit shit—
    The candle burns
    And when that’s done
    the wax lies in cold artistic piles
    Â â€”—s about all I know
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    So I start trudgin down that mountain trail with full pack on my back and think from the thap and steady whap of my shoes on stone and ground that all I need in this world to keep me goin is my feet—my legs—of which I’m so proud, and there they start giving way not 3 minutes after I’ve taken one final look at the shuttered (goodbye strange) cabin and even made a little kneel to it (as one would kneel to the monument of the angels of the dead and the angels of the unborn, the shack where everything had been promised to me by Visions on lightning nights) (and the time I was afraid to do my pushups from the ground, face down, hands, because meseems Hozomeen’ll take bear or abominable form and bend down on me as I lay) (fog)—You get used to the dark, you realize the ghosts are all friendly—(Hanshan says “Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders, people who climb here are always getting scared”)—you get used to all that, you learn that all the myths are true but empty and mythlike aint even there, but there are worse things to fear on the (upsidedown) surface of this earth than darkness and tears—There’s people, your legs giving way, and finally your pockets get rifled, and finally you convulse and die—Little time and no point and too happy to think of that when it’s Autumn and you’re clomping down the mountain to the wondrous cities boiling in the distance—
    Funny how, now the time (in timelessness) has come to leave that hated rock-top trap I have no emotions, instead of