No, not that road

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about Jack Kerouac here. Well, probably not much. I suppose it isn’t really a total coincidence that I called a new blog “On the road” while I had a new copy of Kerouac’s book lying around in the room, but equally there was no deliberate connection, no implication, no reference intended. I haven’t even read Kerouac yet, or at least not much of it, and from what I have read so far his road, except in the barest essentials that we all share, does not seem a lot like mine. I am wondering though, about how much of what we do is driven by things we don’t notice, and whether I would still have thought of this title for the blog if Kerouac hadn’t  crept through the corner of my eye into the corner of my subconscious? And would I be writing such long sentences if I wasn’t in the middle – or not yet even the middle but only somewhere, deep in a subordinate subclause, from where the middle is still several volumes away – of reading Proust? I am also wondering, now I’ve brought it up, about how far any of our roads are really different from anybody else’s. There are a lot of different journeys underway on the M6 tonight. It isn’t necessarily the road that defines the journey.

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