The Long Night of Life

“The long night of life is over.” When I hear these words in the silence of the night and my Essential Mind shines with an empty brightness that seems to come from all numberless directions on the universe like a vision of paradise older than the earth itself and much older, infinitely older than mere human visions of paradise, I know that because it will soon be true, amen, thus it is, ainsi soit il, Om, it is already true.

And what was the long night of life anyway? It was birth, the cause of birth; it was suffering, the cause of suffering; and now it is enlightenment, the cause of enlightenment. And this enlightenment consists of the realization that birth was the cause of suffering, and suffering was the cause of enlightenment, and enlightenment is the cause of the destruction of suffering which now frees me from this long night of life.

I was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell Massachusetts, of simple French-Canadian folk. My father was an insurance salesman, big, jolly, goodhearted, handing out cigars around town. He believed in goodness and got mad when he saw badness. His temper, based on a trustfully Christian sense of justice, eventually got the better of him and he died 24 years later of cancer of the spleen. They say the spleen is the source of anger, and so I suppose the cancer grew there and multiplied on itself as he raged in his mind, like a demon god hopelessly snared in a net of injustice which he would seek to destroy, ending up destroying himself before his time. Even when I was young I would say, “But why get so mad? They’re dishonest but you’re not dishonest and all you do is make yourself mad thinking about them.”

“I tell you it makes me mad to think of all the things that are going on—The hypocrites! The liars! The crooks! The flatterers! The self-important fools! The destroyers! I tell you this was a good world when I was a boy!”

By what miracle was the Dharma revealed to me?

But it wasn’t at all. His father Jacques Kerouac was a farmer in the howling plains of Quebec, he had ten children, the diet was mostly potatoes and the peels were saved for potato soup. This was the result of the wars between the French-Canadians in canoes and the redcoat British with their cannons. Deeper than that it was the result of the original destitution of the Indian people of the New World by the invasion from West Europe. Deeper than that it was the result of the sin of the Indian himself, his greed among neighbors, his slaughter of harmless animals for meat, his murderous rages due to pride, his concupiscence, his attachment to the bloody wheel of life and death. Deeper than that it was the result of Nature herself, her voracious scenery, her upheaval and madness, her chaos of storms, destruction, birth, suffering and death.

Deeper than that it was the result of the Four Great Elements, Earth, Water, Fire and Air combining at the beginning of creation in an ignorant mass of warring details that produced and destroyed one another and provided for the continuation of production and destruction. Deeper than that it was the result of Ignorance appearing like waves on the perfect calm of emptiness, giving rise to illusion, to the shape of things, to the incontrovertible law of things that is their suffering and destruction.

Deeper than this the Cause was Mind, the Universal Essence of Mind, which nevertheless since beginningless time has ever remained pure and undisturbed by all this, because it is free from illusion, free from Ignorance, free from the shape of things, free from birth, from suffering, from destruction, free from the apparition of men in this tiny ash called earth, and free from all their conceptions concerning cause, birth, life, personality, injustice, destruction and death.

I had a long way to go in this long night of life, when I sought to explain to my father why he shouldn’t get mad. And in trying to convince him we warred, and I got mad myself, and he died, and I died with him in my heart.

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M

y mother was Gabrielle Levesque. She was from French Canadian people who lived in Nashua, New Hampshire; but her mother, while pregnant, took a trip to Montreal, and due to a big snowstorm, Gabrielle saw the light of the star of her pity there, in 1895. A twin was born with her but died; and a few weeks later her mother died. Twelve years later her father died. In 1926 her son Gerard, my brother, died at the age of nine, a sad angel wrested from her arms. And then her husband died. Everyone died on her; like the noble Nanon of Balzac’s “Grandet” she went on cooking, scrubbing, working; like the noble of Proust’s “Remembrance” she did not sleep nor undress till the dead were in their graves. Like some devout and ancient saint of Orthodox Russia, to this day her sleepcouch rattles with the rosary bead in mid-night. She burns candles for the Virgin Mary. She has holy water for the storm. A giant crucifix hangs on the wall of my tiny room, where a couch is provided for me with clean sheets and a dresser full of clean, mended clothing. From the time she was 14, when an orphan living with her father’s sisters in Nashua, till this day, with a few interruptions provided by my father’s efforts and mine on one occasion, she has been getting up at 5:30 AM to go to work in the shoe factory. “I never had anything,” she says. “Some women get up when they want, spend the day doing nothing, or causing trouble with the neighbors, and when their husbands come home at night they complain they want this, they want that, they haven’t got enough. I’ll never have anything till the day I die. Everything I ever had slipped through my fingers—my mother, my twin sister, my father, my son, and my husband.” And she yawns, because she never gets enough sleep, and goes to bed on her narrow couch while other women stretch in big beds in large homes in the neighborhood, and I hear the rattle of her rosary beads. Sunday morning she goes to church and gives donations and lights the votive candles. And the only thing I can say to her is, “It’s established in the law of things.”

Which is all too true.

In my heart I was wishing them the Dharma—the only good luck there is.

From the moment I was born of her in the upstairs bedroom of our house on Lupine Road in 1922, to the moment I went to the library in December 1953 and took a book called “Sacred Books of the East” and opened it accidentally to “The Life of Buddha” and saw these words: “O worldly men! how fatally deluded! beholding everywhere the body brought to dust, yet everywhere the more carelessly living; the heart is neither lifeless wood nor stone, and yet it thinks not ‘All is Vanishing’ ”—my life was a puzzle, suffering was my constant activity, and the knowledge of death was a knife in my throat. Now suddenly, on seeing the words “Repose beyond fate” I realized that I had all this time lived in ignorance and struggled and suffered for nothing. Not in these words alone, but in the many others I studied, and the unfolding thought I lent them, till finally when New Year’s Eve came and people were raising drinks and wishing one another good luck in the coming year, I realized that I had crossed the ocean of suffering and was now on the shore because their meaning of “good luck” no longer applied to me. In that instant I knew I had a long way to go in attaining perfect realization of this freedom, that I would fall back many a time into bondage and doubt, that I was only a beginner but at the same time sweet certainty manifested itself in the thoughts of my mind, a calm fearless insight into the true easiness of my goal, inevitable and prophesied somewhere, and I smiled with happiness and wished them “good-luck” with my tongue and in my heart I was wishing them the Dharma—the only good luck there is.

By what miracle was the Dharma revealed to me? By some hopeless walking to a library across a railyard in the winter sunset? By some hopeless, idle thumbing through a dusty book? By mere words imprinted in line across 1 page? By bleak thoughts bent over them? No. By virtue of the Buddhas of old who made their vow to reveal the Dharma, which is its name and means “The Established Law of Things,” long before books were printed, aye long before men and gods and long before the propensity of men and gods to give names, oh long before creation and long after too. It was the manifestation of the universal essence of mind revealing itself to itself, as before and before, as now and now again, as after and long after indeed. As Already.

And would this miracle of the Dharma be revealed to a man or to any form of living being anywhere in the created universe, if he were a piece of empty space devoid of birth, suffering, and destruction? So it is because I am a living being under punishment of birth, suffering, and destruction that the law has been revealed to me. And it was already revealed from the beginning, but the veil of Ignorance was over my eyes in the long night of life and I did not know. Now that I know, I know that I always knew. And with this knowledge comes the realization that I truly don’t know when the long night of life began and if it ever really began or ended.

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From The Buddhist Years: Collected Writings by Jack Kerouac, edited by Charles Shuttleworth. Copyright © 2025 by Jack Kerouac, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.