Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

Although there are legions of us stray cats for whom libraries, bookshops, and movie theaters have served as temples, cathedrals, or sacred groves, it’s still embarrassing to have to admit that, excluding certain LSD epiphanies, the primary, most affecting “metaphysical” (for want of a less suspect term) experiences in my life have each one been connected in some way to movies.

The glue that holds the natural world together appears to be a harmonious balance of opposites: day and night, light and dark, winter and summer, liquid and solid, acidic and alkaline, male and female, wave and trough, proton and electron, etc. There prevails in our reality an explicit duality that represents an implicit unity (the “oneness” about which I’ve previously babbled), and the line of separation between those things just named is as thin as it is necessary: yang rubs up against yin, yin against yang, distinct but mutually supportive.

“Golf is basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.

When we fall asleep, our mind is relieved of duty, it goes on recess, takes a play period, starts looking around for recreation. In that playful mode it snatches up images, figures, and locales from our memory vault and rearranges them, often randomly, usually out of context, for its own amusement or stimulation, trying different incongruous combinations just to observe the results. Your memory bank is your sleeping mind’s toy box.

“Your ideal woman, the one you’ll wanna hold on to, is the one who’s a perfect lady in your living room and an outright slut in your bedroom.

Many writers subsist on grants from foundations. Mine have been from the waitresses of American. The Daughters of the Daily Special.

a lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery

There are, as I’ve suggested, sticky situations, particularly those for which one has volunteered, that, for all the risk involved, are ultimately exhilarating, even life-enhancing. Then there are others, usually unbidden, that are merely creepy, and although one survives them, one feels violated by them, they leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth, and I’m not referring to cologne.

The French say that the best part of an affair is walking up the stairs. I say that it’s probably better to imagine heaven than to go there.