G. Steve Journal

Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.

Heartbeat of Life

Jack Kerouac's writing, and often Tom Wolfe's as well, is routinely criticized for it's stream-of-consciousness format; as Truman Capote once described it: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Yet it is this very quality – an immediate and non-cognitive response to the world – that has made Walt Whitman a beloved, and much imitated, American poet:

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment…to put things down without deliberation…without worrying about their style…without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

[via]