Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

“Logic only gives man what he needs,” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.”

“There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”

After a minute of static and babble, she launched into what might properly be described as a philosophical discourse. “The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of one's existence—the characteristic mode of one's actions—is basically, ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing, then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing.”

A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquillity in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.

if I am honest with myself, I might consider the possibility that the time has long since passed (if, indeed, it ever existed) when I was in possession of a genuinely rational disposition.

were I impeccably objective in my methods (assuming that my motives are above reproach), would I even be present at this ridiculous hot dog stand? And under these circumstances?

The young radicals weren't seeking personal power or economic gains, they were agitating for a more honest, healthy and democratic society.

People aren't hungry for spiritual knowledge and guidance? Then how explain the widespread interest in astrology and yoga and those other primitive pastimes that you romantics are fond of reviving whenever the mainstream of religious tradition loses its authority?”

I saw all around me a voracious spiritual hunger, but the paleolithic mush served up by the church was neither nutritious nor appetizing.

Major technological breakthroughs, such as the ones in electronics and psychochemistry that have occurred in our era, inevitably alter man's image of himself, of his environment and his deity.

They seemed to take personal pride in the lack of a Creator. There isn't any God, ha ha ha. Eventually, I also became an atheist. But I damn sure wasn't happy about it. Maybe there is no God, but there ought to be one.”

I began to think of it as my duty as a scientist and as a human being; my duty was to get close enough to the vortex, to the medulla of evolutionary outburst so that I could experience it in a direct, tangible way. I craved the ultimate scientific luxury of being simultaneously involved and detached.

While the rest of us are busy living—busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing—they are busy taking over. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are addicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and changing—thus, as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so doing deny God.

I believe that you people, among other things, are obsessed with recovering a lost model of existence, a total life-style in which there are no boundaries between object and subject, between natural and supernatural, between waking and dreaming. It's involved somehow in a return to a consanguinity of life and art, life and nature, life and religion—a ritualistic, mythic level of living which whole societies once experienced in common. The object of your rituals, I believe, is to break free of the conventions that have chained man to certain cliché images and predictable responses, that have narrowed pitifully—in your opinion, at least—the range of his experience.”

Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés.” The

What's this horse crap about a 'stable society'? You've gotta be kidding. Nature isn't stable. Life isn't stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can't have both. Take your choice. As for me, I'll choose a free, organic society over a rigid, artificial society any day.

We have radical problems and radical problems demand radical solutions. Our leaders aren't gonna solve our problems, that's obvious. It was leaders, the good ones right along with the bad, who got us into this mess to begin with. And not one of 'em has vision enough or guts enough to push a program radical enough to get us out of the mess.

“Well, the past two thousand years have been frustrated and violent, all right. What you're saying is that Jesus came into a naturally balanced world and threw it out of line.”

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.

“I promise. But, seriously, if life has no meaning—” “To say it has no meaning is not to say it has no value.” “But to say it's all meaningless. Isn't that a cop-out?” “Maybe. But it seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning but that we 'mere mortals' are incapable of ever knowing that meaning. Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all.

To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

“Nothing to lose, Marx, and nothing to gain. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. A man can be as free and happy as he wants to be because there's nothing to lose and nothing to gain.”