Listen to Jack Kerouac reading the last page of his book, On the Road. It is more of a C1 level, but just listen to his
voice and the poetry flowing. There’s no need to understand everything. It is just interesting to hear his flow of words; he reads
his text in the same way that he wrote it.
Transcript
Anyway, I wrote the book because we’re all gonna die. In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away,
my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once we’re rotted by a world, a sweet attention, but now are
left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in the raw bed alone and stupid with just this
one pride and consolation. My heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord. I made a supplication in this dream,
so in the last page of On the Road, I described how the hero, Dean Moriarty has come to see me all the way from the west coast just for a
day or two. We’ve just been back and forth across the country several times in cars and our adventures were over. We’re still great friends
but we have to go into later phases of our lives. So there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in the moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially
for the freezing temperature of the east. Walking off alone and last I saw him, he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street
ahead and bent to it again. Gone.
So, in America, when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all
that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the
immensity of it, and in Iowa, I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll
be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just
before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody,
nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean
Moriarty, the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty. I think of Dean Moriarty.