Journey to the End of the Night

Rating:
Summary: Adventure, Pessimism, Sex, The Beat Generation, French Style
Review: .
This is a unique book. I found Ferdinand Celine very subjective in that I could be him, taking road trips, living on the edge, scraping the bare necessities, surviving and living inside life, suffering through it and enjoying it not as a spectator but participant.

You can say from this book, that is what eventually brought forth the "Beat Generation," which was to occur twenty some odd years later over in the States. And you can see that Celine's style runs all throughout Jack Kerouac's writings. Although Kerouac journeyed much farther into Proustian tangents of descriptive remembrances to the point of walking down long windy alleyways. It's this style of Celine, the somewhat self mystical observances, the internal perceptions of the ordinary, with pessimism, and life from the view of a single, poorer male whose taken quite a few road trips. A few crazy experiences, a few dangerous ones, a [prostitute]or two, problem personalities and an obnoxious friend perhaps. Hey, Cassidy was way cooler than Robinson. Celine tells the Beat Generation from a French experience.

Now I find it's when Celine talks to himself he writes the best quotes, rather then telling the straight story. A few observations of Celine:

" A madman's thoughts are just the usual ideas of a human being, except that they're hermetically sealed inside his head. The world never gets into his head, and that's they way he wants it. A sealed head is like a lake without an outlet, standing, stagnant." p. 357

" There are simple lunatics and there are others, tortured by obsession with civilization. p. 361

" What with stretching ourselves thin, with sublimating ourselves and torturing out minds, we'll end up on the far side of intelligence, the infernal side, that there's no coming back from! . . . And the fact is, what with masturbating their intelligence day and night, those ultra super wise men seem even now to have shut themselves up in the dungeons of the damned"

" I say day and night, because you know, Ferdinand, they fornicate themselves all night in their dreams . . Need I say more! . . . They dig at their minds! They dilate them! They tyrannized them! All around them there's nothing left but a foul sublimating of organic debris, a marmalade of madness and symptoms that drip and oozed from every part of them. p. 365

" Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget." p. 288

" Maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. and where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. pp. 172-173

" Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you're in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That's not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can't content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn't very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you've got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic.". p. 207

" There's no tyrant like the brain!" p. 207

" A room changes in a few months, even if you don't move anything. Old and rundown as things may be, they still find the strength, the Lord knows where, to get older. Everything had changed around us. Not that anything had moved, no, of course not, the things themselves had actually changed, in depth. Things are different when you go back to them, they seem to have more power to enter into us more sadly, more deeply, more gently than before, to merge with the death which is slowly, pleasantly, sneakily growing inside us, and which we train ourselves to resist a little less each day. From moment to moment, we see life languishing, shriveling inside us, and with it the things and people who may have been commonplace or precious or imposing when we last left them. Fear of the end has marked all that with its wrinkles, while we were chasing around town in search of pleasure or bread." pp. 321-322

" Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time." p. 180

" Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn't work, they deep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "You're pretty Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick, "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle . . . "

" And in between they boast that they've succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it's not true and they've simply kept it all to themselves. Since at that little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can't hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thirty years or more to climb from your belly to your face. That's all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn't always succeed in completing it." p. 252