On the way to a friend’s wedding Saturday, my own best man began talking about how Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was written on one, big, long scroll of paper.

I had wondered why he mentioned it, but today, I found out the manuscript is being auctioned by Christie’s, with an estimated price of US$1.5 million.

As displayed on the Christie’s site, the manuscript truly does look holy (as Benjamin Anastas wrote in FEED). Seeing the 120–foot-long roll, reminded me that, like millions of people, Kerouac’s words had a tremendous effect on me.

In fact, in a strange way, Kerouac led me onto the Web.

I’d been hanging out in the Usenet discussing the Beats when someone suggested I take a look a Beat-related Web site. This would have been September 1994 December 1994, and the site I was referred to was Levi Asher’s LitKicks (which went online about two months earlier).

Netscape had not yet just been released, and though Mosaic was still around, I only had access to the Web via a Unix shell account. The first Web site I ever saw was Levi’s via the all-text lynx browser.

Though a fantastic resource, what I took away from that first visit was being transported to a page about the group, Nirvana after pressing the right arrow key on the word ”nirvana.” Moving around was so much easier when compared with punching in gopher address and numeric telnet address. It was fluid, natural, spontaneous — much like the best of Kerouac’s writing.

Though, the Web has changed dramatically since then, having been tamed by the lure of money, I still believe the it can live up to the potential I first felt while reading about Kerouac.