26th sentence of the 26th book

The 26th book* on my Kerouac bookshelf is Jack Kerouac's The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights, 1994), and the 26th sentence (in honor of today being the 26th day of the month) is:

Thus I made that sky, I am the golden eternity.

There's a lot of wisdom packed into The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. I saw the following on Google when I searched "golden eternity." It's close to a longer quote in Kerouac's book, but it comes from a letter he wrote to Edie Parker on January 28, 1957**:

...listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world and you will remember the lesson you forgot.

In Scripture, the passage is:

...listen to the inside silence in the womb of the world, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, re-recognize the bliss you forgot, the emptiness and essence and ecstasy of ever having been and ever to be the golden eternity. This is the lesson you forgot.

Jack was a recycler of words, as we have pointed out before. Nevertheless, both passages are bomber examples of his command of Buddhist truths.



*The next book on my shelf was actually Kerouac's Some of the Dharma, but it does not lend itself to counting sentences. Similarly, I decided to skip extra copies of On The Road and The Dharma Bums (been there done that), a copy of Pomes All Sizes (poetry doesn't lend itself to sentence counting), and a copy of Robert Lowry's The Big Cage (scarcely Kerouacian) -- all of which were lying sideways on in front of the books on the first shelf; thus, they didn't lend themselves to being counted as "next" on the shelf. I could say that about yesterday's entry, Genesis Angels, as well, as it was lying sideways atop the first row of books. To explain, I would remind you that this is a random and weird undertaking and, besides, I had my reasons for including it, not the least of which is that I had not curated this particular book in my recent project. If you are still awake after reading this paragraph, go see a doctor right away.

**This Brainpickings article claims the source letter is in The Portable Jack Kerouac, but I didn't find it in my copy. I did find it in Ann Charter's Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969.