“Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain.”
The Background:
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac is the book that changed my mind about reading. Before picking up his book, my mind was made up; I hated reading. For some reason, I ended up with Kerouac’s novel about Zen Buddhism in the 1950s. Maybe this book came into my life at the perfect time, going into my Junior year of college. Which wasn’t the best time; I played water polo for Santa Clara Universities NCAA team and had to red-shirt because I tore my labrum in a practice, relationship trouble smacked me in the face, and I began to realize the plans I had played out in my head were no longer pointed towards my north star.
If you don’t know much about Kerouac, you should give him a quick Google search, but if you are feeling lazy here are some highlights that I have clung onto: The Beatles credit their name to Kerouac, a beatnik is pretty much a modern-day #vanlifer, Kerouac wrote Big Sur as a single run-on sentence, all of his books are fictionalized auto-biographies, and sadly he drank himself to death.
The Dharma Bums plot is the meeting and development of a bromance between Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder through Zen. Now, by no means is this book a textbook on Zen Buddhism, nor would I even say The Dharma Bums is about Buddhism, but Zen is mentioned in almost every chapter. The irony is comical and the lessons on freedom and unlocking the self are thought-provoking if you give Kerouac’s words time to digest.
Why this quote:
The quote, “Ah Japhy [aka Snyder] you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain…” said Kerouac to Snyder on their way down the Matterhorn in Northern Yosemite. While this quote shows the playfulness of Kerouac trying to understand there is meaning in every moment of life if you are willing to listen. While scrambling to the top of the Matterhorn is a physical accomplishment, the quote takes the physical and becomes metaphorical. Once you have reached a goal or the top of a mountain, it can not be taken away from you.
Just for fun, I am going to poke some holes in the quote. It is true, you can’t fall off a mountain, but you surely can fall down a cliff. Once we reach a goal, we can choose how we share our accomplishments. There is a right way and a wrong way, which has to do with our ego and how we accept/reject society's norms. If one decided to leap off a cliff, they would surely fall and… yup. Think about the people who accomplish something and take their sharing to far, the essentially jump off the cliff. A perfect example of the wrong way to come down the mountain. The irony in jumping off a cliff is the quote remains true, you can’t fall off the mountain because a mountain continues even after the cliff. Getting to the top of a mountain is only halfway, you still need to return safely.
As a person who enjoys a good scramble to the top of a peak, I deeply relate to this quote. However, at the time of reading The Dharma Bums, I did not have much outdoor experience. Kerouac’s novel sparked the kindling that lay inside of me which asked a simple question, “Why am I living?” Without knowing, this novel altered my path and directed me to where I am now… living in a van, pursuing a photography/writing career, and spending as much time as feasible possible wither in the mountains or the ocean.