Two more from yesterday’s Sotherby’s sale. There’s this (Kerouac’s typed letter to Allen, from February of 1953, refusing to promote William Burroughs’ Junkie)
and these – “two typed letters to Allen Ginsberg, analyzing his vision of William Blake through his new Buddhist worldview”
Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954:
“‘One day,’ you write, ‘in the middle of summer as I was walking down 125 street I suddenly stopped and stared around me in amazement. It was as if I had just wakened from a long, vague, stupid dream that I’d walked around in all my life … The whole mad apparition of an evil sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance … When I returned home to my apartment, my first impulse was to consult an old author, WmBlake, whom I had remembered from earlier days… etc.’ and if you had consulted the wisdom of the east instead, direct, instead of via Swedenborg and his phoney [sic] mysticism… Don’t you see that everything western is really only a perversion of everything eastern.? The sun rises from the east, it sets in the west.”
Check out the links given in the text – Illuminating. interesting documents.