Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home.

The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged. Torn between showing this thought to the door or seating it in a place of honor, Alobar was relieved of the dilemma by a steaming teacup, shoved into his grasp.

“Namby-pamby, huh? Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul.

Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.”

“Is not Pan a male god?” asked Alobar. “True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

Fear, like love, is a call into the wild—into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”

Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more.

“You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.”

if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.

The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

“Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, Kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender. Poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?”

The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.” She stopped to catch her breath. “To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

Life ebbs away, but money, properly managed, grows and continues to grow, lifetime after lifetime. Life is transitory, money is eternal.

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion. Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion. Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of sexual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

They weren't as much fun, anymore, the poor homers; they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address.

Pan's song, because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the human yoke of purposes, was, above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out). To Kudra it was the aural equivalent of the rope trick: a giddy ascent up a shaky coil, to arrive in a place of mystery, where the sense of all-encompassing oneness with the natural world and the sense of the absolute aloneness of the individual coexist and commingle.

the gods do not limit men. Men limit men.”

When they shook their tambourines and sistrums, in voluptuous poses, feudal barons found them irresistible, but that made them all the more hateful in the eyes of the pious and grave, a reaction that was for Alobar a source of endless delight. Kudra chided him for it mildly, but he was rarely happier than when savoring the fear and disgust that welled up in proper Christians at the sight of their rattling, tinkling troupe. The opinion that “all good things must come to an end” is a confession of fatalism that the immortalist hand of Alobar would never sign.

If Kudra is dead like all the others, then it does me well to curtail my grief, lest my life become a deathly imitation through depression and sorrow.”

play—more than piety, more than charity or vigilance—was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.

“Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”

“Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals.

Einstein's last words were, “Erleichda, erleichda.”

“Wiggs,” she said, “all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and Amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically, uh, barbecued your brain?” “Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.” At that, even the rain backed away.

“Proper breathin', in addition, reduces stress, and stress is a major contributor to agin', disease, and death. Alobar had been introduced to the virtues o' slow, relaxed breathin' at Samye lamasery. 'The lungs are not plow yaks,' the lamas said, 'so do not drive them. Neither are they potting sheds, so keep them free of cobwebs.'

The body is the servant o' the mind, and if we keep tellin' our bodies that they're probably goin' to croak, age seventy-two, then come seventy-two, croak they will.

Wiggs was teaching her that “harsh realities” were not the only realities: that there were many different realities, and to a certain extent, with the proper focus of energy, one could choose which reality one wished to live.

The enemy represents Death to 'em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin', devourin' monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o' death. And 'tis precisely because we hate death so much that we're too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill—and die—in order to try to halt its march.”

“I'm surprised you don't believe in reincarnation.” “Why? 'Tis probably just another rationalization. Reincarnation—or the transmigration o' souls—was an idea spawned in one o' the most rigid social systems humanity has ever devised. Your ancient Hindu was stuck like a gnat in amber. Durin' his lifetime, he was obliged to live in a prescribed place with a prescribed family and practice a prescribed occupation. The possibility o' mobility did not exist. The hand you were dealt at birth was the hand you played. Everythin' was predestined, and you couldn't change a bleedin' dot o' it. Since they had no chance o' change in life, 'tis only natural they fantasized about change in the afterlife. Reincarnation was simply a fantasy your Hindu perpetuated to keep his rigid reality model from drivin' him mad.