Carolina QuotesNight, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.
Tom Robbins Carolinian
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)
- year
- 1994
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison …” Tom Robbins. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6CB6FC902D. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6cb6fc902d
More from Tom Robbins
Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.
Although I participated enthusiastically in the sixties psychedelic revolution, and tried to mimic it – its trappings, its mythology, its silliness, its profundity – in print in my first novel, I had nothing to do with its creation. Rather, it was the confluence of two disparate elements – acute socio-political dissatisfaction and pharmacological neo-shamanism – that precipitated it; and it was democracy, as much as ferocious opposition from both the right-wing and left-wing establishments, that caused it to eventually unravel. Democracy? Yep, oddly enough. The counterculture light was so bright it began to attract moths (people who sadly were not intellectually or spiritually prepared to meaningfully assimilate transformative multi-dimensional data streams from hyperspace) and stinging stink bugs (the thugs that invariably invade every utopia) in such great numbers that they eventually crowded out the butterflies (the educated middle class truth-seekers who switched on the light in the first place). That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite. In America, the relatively finite psychedelic culture was shoved aside by the burgeoning boogie culture, whose drugs of choice were booze, speed, and cocaine; and whose goal was not to attain spiritual bliss, deeper understanding, or an end to war and repression but rather to get thoroughly fucked up.
We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies. Individualism is bad for business – though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. And yes, it's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism..