Jack and the Hippies

While reading John Clellon Holmes’ text, Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook, I was taken to what the end of the sixties must have felt like for the hippie generation. I was lead to think that, despite the fact that Jack Kerouac was a considered a Beat, he somehow represents the whole 60s generation as it approaches the 1970s.

I read through Holmes’ journal entries and watched his depiction of a dear friend spiral into a self destructive and troubled place. Jack went on drinking binges to talk and create and think just as much as the hippie generation found peace and love through drug induced experiences.
On page 428, Holmes writes that his wife saw that “Jack & I share the same horror & hatred of “this world,” and of course, it’s more than a little true.” I can’t help think about the hippie movement and how they were trying to change the world for what they saw as the better. Bringing in peace and love and ending the things that they hated about how society was shaping up. Their answer was peace, love and rock n’ roll. Jack’s answer was drinking himself out of the idea that the world he seemed to hate could not be changed.

Also, the way that Jack died reinforced the hippie connection for me. The hippie generation practiced their lifestyle in excess. Lots of drugs and lots of love in hope that the outcome would be lots of piece. In the end, that lifestyle would not prevail towards their intended outcome of peace and unity much the same as Jack’s excessive drinking was eventually the end of him in October 1969, ironically, the end of the infamous 60s decade.

On a separate note, Holmes writes about a thought he had that stated “Nothing that you think today will be true; no pre-vision of the-way-things-are will be real” (427). After watching the inauguration of President Barack Obama, something about this sentence is ringing loud for me. Nothing I thought yesterday about our country’s future is quite true today. The speech impacted me and others with hopefulness much as I think Woodstock did for the Hippie cause and their generation. Something great was happening and what we think today as true might become even better in the future. We have no way to know how we will define “the way things are” come the third year of Obama’s presidency. That uncertainty is leaving me very hopeful and I was surprised to find something like that in such a grim piece of writing.