Free Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac

he rolls over and over until he again swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He stares at the floor, sighing through his teeth and making crazy sounds come out of his throat.
    â€œI’m crazy,” he concludes, beginning to dress.
    Dressed, he goes to the kitchen and opens the pantry door. He finds a box of crackers, takes it down. He finds some peanut butter, and some cold milk in the ice box. With a knife, he butters the crackers; he pours the foaming milk into a glass, and seats himself at the table, putting a newspaper under his meal. It is the funny page, and as he eats and drinks, he studies the comics carefully. Even the funnies are gray and colorless, but although their world does not cry with color and dazzling light, their deeds are romantic. Richard turns on the radio to an all-day recording program, and listens to the announcer making his commercial with a trained, enthusiastic, precise voice. And then the music comes on, and the empty house is filled with music, but it’s only from the radio. Life is still gray; the music is joyful, but it is a sad joy that does not go beyond the radio, and fails to penetrate the invincible gray wall of life. It is a music that is thwarted, yet goes on self-sufficient and self-satisfied.
    Richard goes to the window and looks down the street. A yellow bus goes by and a man comes down the street on a bicycle. A newspaper boy is untying his pile of papers, his wagon ready. Somebody is coming out of the barber shop, yelling back into it and laughing as he goes across the street to the Club. Inside the Club, Richard thinks, he will have a glass of beer to celebrate his new haircut. Richard presses his nose against the window pane and crosses his eyes. “What a screwy world this is!” he says out loud. “There’s nothing in it. Everything is gray, even my eyes.”
    Richard gets up from the chair and goes to his room. He lies down on the bed and drowses off, saying: “To hell with it. I’m going to sleep it off.”
    And he does.

[I Know I Am August]
    Kerouac notes on this typescript dated 1940 that the first five lines are a version of Walt Whitman’s (from the long opening poem of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, later titled “Song of Myself”) and the remainder of the poem is his writing. In a journal entry from June 4, 1941, Kerouac writes: “Again got up late. Read more Whitman—great man, regardless of what they say. True, he may be an old sensuous wolf, but his philosophy of individualism cannot be beat—although his democracy is inapplicable. [...] Here’s something from Whitman that is deathless:
    I know I am august
    I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
    I see that the elementary laws never apologize.
    Also, about man:
    WHO GOES THERE? HANKERING, GROSS, MYSTICAL, NUDE . . . .
    My next reading will be London & Wolfe.”
    In 1950 Kerouac wrote to New England poet Rosaire Dion-Lévesque, who had published a French translation of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “Whitman was my first real influence; it was on the spur of reading Whitman that I decided to cross the country. ”
    I know I am august
    I never trouble my soul to vindicate itself;
I see that the elementary laws never apologize.
    Â 
    What is this blurt about vice and about virtue?
Evil and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent.
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    There is a great song ringing through the pavilions of life:
    Is this a paradox or is [it] a fact?
I believe the former is so.
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    I am no judge of Life’s immutable whimsies,
But I do know that it is fraught with richness and with
death;
And so perhaps it is better that this be no Utopia,
For what a gray tale of nothingness we could unfold
To the progeny untold
That would follow to do the same in turn.
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    I am a Man;
You are a Man;
We are all Men.
Thus I stand, and thus you stand, the Lord and Master
Of the domain called the Universe.
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    It is in