A Particular Form of Insight

Excerpted from Variations On A Generation by Gregory Corso, ©1959:

–But what do you think about the Beat Generation?–

–A certain style, when you look back on it, old photos, Fitzgerald in Paris, 1920, high society, prohibition, jazz; that’s more what characterized a generation than what they believed in. The fundamental facts are always the same, the style changes, but the facts, my boy, the facts remain.–

–Are you beat?–

–Well I’m not a square, you see a square is some guy who forces himself arbitrarily into a square auto-life mold, because squareness is not a shape that any living creature occurs in. There are varieties of squares in America. Take for instance a sharecropper, only thing he’d share would be his manure, now that’s kind of square, ain’t it?–

–You’re beat, then?–

–Beatness may result from any sort of fundamental experience, a particular form of insight whereby you realize that nine tenths of everything that moves and operates people is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _!–

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