Happy birthday, wherever you are tonight
Mar. 12th, 2005 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweed"March 12, 1922, at five o'clock in the afternoon, in Lowell, Mass. was the day of the first thaw. I was born on the second floor of a wooden house on Lupine Road, which to this day sits on top of a hill overlooking Lakeview Avenue and the broad Merrimack River. From this house my mother, God bless her dear heart, lay listening to the distant roar of the Pawtucket Falls a mile away; she has told me all this. Besides of which it was a strange afternoon, red as fire; "noisy with a lyrical thaw," as I said in my fictions of the past, and that is to say the snow was melting so fast you could hear it in a million small streams under vast snowy banksides crumbling just a little in their middles from the weight of moisture. Pines dripped like the seasonal maple, made gum and gummy firsmells in the air. Great shoulders of snow dropped precipitous from their bleak wood. These descriptions are necessary at this point, for the following reason.
All my life I was fascinated by the first thaws of New England March; not until I was told I was actually born in the midst of one did I vaguely remember the day of my birth, or is this too far-fetched? Not in the least (my darkface protests across the continent to thee.) I remember it, I remember the day of my birth. I remember the red air and the sadness--"the strange red afternoon light" [Thomas] Wolfe also was hung on--with particular eternity-dream vividness, or if not vividness, vastness; some dream of late afternoon. Six years later, on a similar red afternoon, but in dead of frozen winter, I discovered my soul; that is to say, I looked about for the first time and realized I was in a world and not just myself."
[Jack Kerouac, from letter to Neal Cassady, December 28, 1950)
All my life I was fascinated by the first thaws of New England March; not until I was told I was actually born in the midst of one did I vaguely remember the day of my birth, or is this too far-fetched? Not in the least (my darkface protests across the continent to thee.) I remember it, I remember the day of my birth. I remember the red air and the sadness--"the strange red afternoon light" [Thomas] Wolfe also was hung on--with particular eternity-dream vividness, or if not vividness, vastness; some dream of late afternoon. Six years later, on a similar red afternoon, but in dead of frozen winter, I discovered my soul; that is to say, I looked about for the first time and realized I was in a world and not just myself."
[Jack Kerouac, from letter to Neal Cassady, December 28, 1950)
