Monday's Body of Work

Kerouac Finds His Inner Voice

We live in a time of intense self-examination. Our personalities are scrutinized, our traits boiled down, our lives plucked and analyzed like wonderfully strange flowers. But self-examination is nothing new. It’s been around ever since that first hunter looked at his spear and wondered if it were big enough. Sometimes, personal examination causes a kind of paralysis. Other times, though, it liberates us. Just look at writers. We are notoriously self-possessed and lurk for hours in the secret places of the brain. Perhaps Jack Kerouac spent too much time doing this. After all, he had trouble managing most everything else. The Cabell First Novelist Award has been announced — one of self-examination’s more lucrative rewards. To get to our core we must consider art, and ethics. Two new essays discuss this further. The Daily Sun reflects on the Nigerian poet Chris Okigbo. He was a brave and talented man. Readers should feel free to compare his life with their own. Finally, how our families make us what we are, and a new book on dancing, which is both the impetus for and the result of too much self-examination.  – Kevin Murphy

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