What's in a voice?  Plenty:  our voice defines and expresses who we are.  Never has this been more true in the life of Jack Kerouac, the American author most famous for his existentialist travel classics On the Road and Big Sur.  Author Joyce Johnson, who at one point in her life had a relationship with Kerouac, titled her newly released biography of her long ago friend The Voice is All.  Using careful and well informed research, Ms. Johnson paints a memorable portrait of Kerouac as a person who struggled to find his voice, his muse, his authorial vision, the unfolding of the contents of his thought, the numerous twists of his life, relationships, and longings.  And as anyone who has read his travel classics knows, he succeeded brilliantly.
     As expressive beings, we are born with the capacity--and desire--to give voice to what we think, consider, and feel, to make concrete the innards of our person.  We all want to, in some way, to announce ourselves; we all want to, in some way, to make ourselves known, to give voice to who we in ourselves are, our unique manifestation of being amidst a vast and nebulous sea of human beingness.
     And why not?  Each of us is wonderful, special, and unique.  There is no one, absolutely no one, who is exactly like us.  And there is no one, absolutely no one, whose voice, whose expression of life's wonder is precisely like our own.  The universe is ours to know, the universe is ours to share.  It speaks, and so must we.  Otherwise, we're nothing.
     Imagine a voiceless universe, a universe with no reason to speak:  who would give it speech?
     To wit:  only one from whom all things come.