Chapter 7 & 8 Summary

Chapter seven finds Kerouac in only his forth day at Big Sur, and beginning to get bored. Remembering the words of Emerson that "infancy conforms to nobody" and that "life is not an apology," he returns his thinking to the beauty of the simple things around him. He gives himself to being a student of the tiny tasks using the most inexpensive and simple of his tools. He also wonders, upon reflection, whether he should not have let his boredom take him to the sea to write down every sound the ocean made, that perhaps that is some of what drove him mad.

But that is the way he spends his three weeks, engrossed in the simplicity of his daily tasks and making the sojourn to the sea every evening with his secretarial notepad. He contemplates the fact that this unchanged place is...