News at Eleven: But it is also true that those rags--ghosts

from the inevitable future, time bombs woven into our very DNA--are with us even when we're at our most transcendent. If, in some sense, that's a form of failure, it's the same failure we all face, the failure to sustain ourselves in the face of eternity, to build a firewall against the void. No one ever tried harder [than Kerouac]--making his friends into mythic figures, turning his adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self.

from Bookforum: Roamin' Legions

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