Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

ON CERTAIN DAYS, DRIVING INTO SANTA MONICA WAS LIKE having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.

Back in junior college, professors had pointed out to Doc the useful notion that the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory.

and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

“Hey . . . but as a founding father, don’t you get freaked out a little with this black apocalypse talk?” “The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” replied Jefferson. “It is its natural Manure.” “Yeah, and what about when the patriots and tyrants turn out to be the same people?” said Doc, “like, we’ve got this president now . . .” “As long as they bleed,” explained Jefferson, “is the thing.

People in this town saw only what they’d all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.

For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.