Herding Chaos

I loved this paragraph so much that I stenciled it on my door in college. Now I find out that the original text (from the scroll of On the Road versus Kerouac’s novelization) goes as follows:

the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing … but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night

It’s not that different, however, the wonderful ending was added later.

…exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!

The NYT has some terrific examples of the covers of On the Road in other countries. Some places really got it, others not so much.

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