Interview with Ken Kesey
For those of you who have a little bit of time to kill, read this interview from The Paris Review : http://bit.ly/b9039X . There have been few times in my life when I’ve felt as inspired as I do now. Sitting in my office chair, staring at a computer screen and there’s a yearning in my heart to get out and explore - an insatiable longing for wilderness. There’s nothing I want more right now than a strong jawline and a cigarette.
TL;DR - here are a few of my favorite parts:
“You study literature because you’re a scholar of what’s fair. It’s just a way of learning how to be what we want to be. We go to concerts to hear a piece by Bach not because we want to be intellectuals or scholars or students of Bach, but because the music is going to help us keep our moral compass needle clean.”
“Kerouac was a giant to the end, a sad giant. But then giants are usually sad.”
“ The reaction against control is often violent and destructive and lashes out in all directions, even against things that are beneficial. If a man doesn’t have a little madness, he never breaks the control lock that gets placed on reality. It’s facing the vast ocean alone, without the safety of land or boat.”
“What keeps us from being monsters are Emerson and Thoreau and the Beatles and Bob Dylan—great artists who teach us to love and hold off on the hurt. The hurt is inside of us, and of course we can always randomly hurt something, but a great artist will teach you to love a thing and not want to possess it or alter it—just to love it… finally you have to love them all—the poor, broken human beings, even the worst of them.”
“The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
