A Dharma Bum on Mango Street

Over the last few weeks (as previously mentioned here) my eleventh grade students and I have been working with the novella The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. As one of the culminating projects, I have assigned students to present graphically (via a map or PowerPoint) a layout of the homes, stores and buildings on Mango Street, one purpose being to reinforce the idea that although the novel presents individual vignettes about the inhabitants in isolation (one character, one vignette), in truth life moves on simultaneously.

In explaining the assignment I asked if students had ever walked through their neighborhood at night (as I often do with my dog and wife) and noticed that within many of the homes, there are people are talking, watching television, playing instruments, in short LIVING, at the same exact moment they are seeing it? After explaining that I was not a stalker, but rather that this observation as something made innocently, they seemed to (sort of) get "it."

With this in the back of my head, I found it interesting that yesterday as I was reading The Dharma Bums, I came across this excerpt which sort of speaks to the same idea and takes it further:

"But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips."
~Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969) Source: The Dharma Bums

For some reason thoughts and ideas occasionally seem to converge in time and space...