Gone

Jack Kerouac had an excitement for life. This excitement should not be confused with happiness, for he and those others of the Beat Generation and all others such associations before and after were certainly not happy people. Happiness is not something we humans have much experience with. Happiness implies a degree of contentment. The reason that poets describe happiness as simple quiet moments, such as a warm hearth or a snowfall or a summer’s breeze has less to do with perfection of simple moments than with the fact that on this earth happiness can only exist for minutes at a time and then only in the stillness. Excitement looks towards the future, thus it is not a kind of happiness as it would at first seem, but rather a kind of sadness. Excitement and despair are two types of sadness, the difference being the presence or absence of hope.