Somewhere during my ten-day stay in Paris (and Brittany), I experienced something akin to enlightenment, which seems to have changed me again into something that I suppose will be my mold for another seven years or more: essentially, a satori, the Japanese word for 'sudden enlightenment', 'sudden awakening' or simply 'a bolt from the blue'.
Whatever it was, something indeed happened, and in my early reflections after the trip, now that I have returned, placing all those jumble of plenty events from those ten days in their proper context, it seems that the cause for the satori was a taxi driver named Raymond Baye; at other times I think it must have been my paranoid fear in the fog-filled streets of Brest at 3 a.m., sometimes again I think it was Monsieur Castigliau and his stunningly beautiful secretary (a Breton with blue-black hair, green eyes, sparse front teeth, neatly placed in luscious lips, a white woolen knitted sweater, gold bracelets, and perfume) or the waiter who told me 'Paris est pourri' or the performance of Mozart’s Requiem in the old church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with the enthralled violinists happily bumping their elbows, because so many distinguished people had appeared filling the pews and the special chairs (and outside it was snowing) or, for the love of God, what;
When Jack Kerouac, the spiritual father of the Beat generation, arrived in Paris seeking the roots of his Breton name, he was swept into an odyssey of adventures that would captivate his readers for many years. In ten thrilling, stormy days he tasted dozens of experiences, from his encounter with a faded French beauty in a gangster bar in Montparnasse to a surreal discussion with his Breton namesake with the sharp nose. Any one of these could have been the cause of his sudden awakening, his sudden enlightenment, his 'satori' in Paris.
[Excerpt from publisher or edition presentation text]
