Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

Time sucked on a chloroform Popsicle.

By 1960, Richmond’s Village Inn was starting to earn a nationwide word-of-mouth reputation as one of the alcohol-vending establishments (the Seven Seas in New Orleans, the Blue Moon in Seattle, the Cedar Tavern in New York, and Vesuvio in San Francisco were other examples) where gigless be-boppers, itinerant artists, nonacademic poets, freelance photographers, practicing existentialists, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, dharma drifters, “angel-headed hipsters,” full-time eccentrics, and newly christened beatniks of varying plumage could expect to be tolerated by management and welcomed by regular patrons (many of them students with fake IDs), ever eager for fresh stories from the American road, an exchange of intellectual ideas; and maybe, just maybe, someone new and exciting to sleep with.

In fact, the hyperbole does not exist that would do it justice.

there are ignorant parties who equate being high with drunkenness, the two conditions are diametrically opposed, the one opening up consciousness the way fifteenth-century explorers opened up new worlds, the other shutting it down like a bankrupt pawnshop.

A cathedral made of mathematics and honey seems to best sum it up.

I took away from the event, namely the realization that every daisy that exists -- every single daisy in every single field -- has an identity just as strong as my own! I assure you a revelation such as that cannot help but change one’s life. It altered my view of the natural world and my place within it, top to bottom, and for weeks thereafter I could not see a daisy in a window box or someone’s yard without getting tears in my eyes.

it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society

“Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.”

apple-pie hamlets isn’t always reflective of scenes from Norman Rockwell paintings. The face our rural villages present to the world -- freckled, pie-stained, pious, and gullible -- can hide not only political corruption (or pathological ineptitude: often it’s hard to tell the difference), meth labs, and steamy surreptitious sexual shenanigans -- but all manner of just plain quirky behavior.

the book led me to be considered a suspect in the Unibomber case.

The conspicuous consumption in capitalist countries such as ours is deadening to the soul, but an absence of variety and choice can be psychically impoverishing, as well.

Conditioned by my boyhood in economically contrastive Blowing Rock, I’ve always been attracted to both sides of the tracks, equally disposed to the high life and the low life.

Timbuktu, once (primarily between in the twelfth through sixteen centuries) a wheeling and dealing center of enormous wealth, is now impoverished, suffering from depopulation, and is gradually being buried beneath the advancing Sahara Desert. One need not be a visionary to conclude that in time Wall Street, too, will be desolate and wasted, victim of a failed system, covered not by sand but by water as a poisoned, overheated ocean steals in to bear us oxygen junkies back to “the cradle we all rocked out of.”

Tawny, low, and organic; hermetic, bare, crumbling in places, Timbuktu seemed made of cookie dough and starlight; rising like rough ginger popovers out of the magmatic ovens of the underworld, open only to the incandescent carousel of the whirly night, a city simultaneously earthy and unearthly. Antique races had fashioned it from the very desert they’d dreamed upon, enriched it with gold and salt, elevated it with wisdom (holy and astronomic) from near and far -- and now must look on silently from beyond the grave as the desert takes it back.

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.