I think there are other ways of reading the book, and the character, that yield further rewards even once you’re out of the phase where the premise of the book dazzles all on its own.I always struggle with this sentiment. I know that plenty of the books (or albums, or films, or what have you) about which I have really strong emotional impressions years afterward would actually reveal themselves as subtler, more intellectually interesting works of art if I were to revisit them as an older, wiser, less sentimental person -- more as a connoisseur than a fan. But for works of art like On the Road, which I associate with an identity (teenage bohemian) that I've pretty much erased from my identity now but for which I still have great affection, I'm not sure I want to overwrite those simplistic impressions. It's similar to that passage in Life on the Mississippi in which Mark Twain talks about how his perception of the river changed when he learned how to navigate it:
a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that[...]Obviously Twain (and Ned and I) bet, in life, on "gained most" by educating ourselves, and I think romanticizing ignorance as "wonder" can be misguided: the people who are that compelled by rivers, or books, or the human body are going to be driven to learn more about them one way or another. It's easy to miss wonder but forget how much fun discovery has been. But I'm not sure that when there are so many books I've never read that I can enjoy for their subtle, intellectual pleasures, I should go back and reread On the Road instead of treating it as an artifact of a time in my life that felt more magical.No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?