Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

“Rise to what, Jesus? To abstractions? And alienation? Your scroll there, your book of Genesis, says that in the beginning was the Word. The simplest savage could see that in the beginning was the orgasm. Life is reproduced from life, while resurrection—the regeneration of seeds, the return in the spring of the leaves that fell in the autumn—is of matter, not of spirit. Unsophisticated? Maybe it's unsophisticated to venerate mountains and regard rivers as sacred, but as long as man thinks of his natural environment as holy, then he's gonna respect it and not sell it out or foul it up. Unsophisticated? Hell, it's going to take science a couple of thousand more years to determine that life originated when a cupful of seawater containing molecules of ammonia was trapped in a pocket in a shore rock where it was abnormally heated by ultraviolet light from the sun. But we pagans have always sensed that man's roots were inorganic. That's why we had respect even for stones.”