“The word would be used as in conversation: ‘Would you like to go to the Bronx Zoo?’ ‘Nah, man I'm too beat, I was up all night.’ So, the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise. Or, as it once implied, beat meant finished, completed, in the dark night of the soul or in the cloud of unknowing. It could mean open, as in the Whitmanesque sense of openness, equivalent to humility. So beat was interpreted in various circles to mean emptied out, exhausted, and at the same time wide-open and receptive to vision.”
– Herbert Huncke, Huncke's Journal, (1965)