Rereading some journals, which I also used as commonplace books for favorite quotes, I found this, from Kerouac, on writerly vocation as vague intuition. He's writing about a party attended by Ginsburg and other people who would become known as the Beat Generation:
“. . . someday I will leave the sad nightmarish world of my friends which is slowly sickening me. Horror horror all the time when I see them—and joy when I don’t. There ought to be something sane in making a decision. It’s only when I get drunk I want to see everybody and see everything. I want to be a fool and I want to be self-flagellating like them. One thing: I understand this generation well, and all this is part of some shrewd unconscious purpose of mine, as always. When my work is done with these people, then and only then can I turn to other worlds.” (italics mine)
—Kerouac’s journal, Tuesday March 9, 1948 (from Windblown World: the Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954)
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