I'm reading On the Road. (though I am told that this is the kind of book most people get over by the time they're sixteen.) I read it on the tube, mainly. I'm going from SW to NE London on the Picadilly line, shooting through Green Park, Covent Garden, Holborn. And Sal is going from East to West. God, just the very sound of the places he passes through sound so intoxicating. Testament, Georgia, New Orleans, New Mexico, Arizona, Denver, the mysical and revered 'Frisco'. He writes of purple darkness, a heaven of a sunrise, red mountainsides, transmuting clouds of gold. The sentence 'We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn' isn't remarkable or poetic in itself, but somehow it makes me so itchy and hopeful. I met a woman today, a colleague from our sister company in America, who mentioned a post-Wellesley road trip to Denver, and I nearly passed out with excitement.