Read Online The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: United States, General, science, Social Science, History, Psychology, Psychopathology, Addiction, Popular Culture, drug abuse, Hippies - United States, Hippies, drug addiction, Applied Sciences, Drug addiction - United States
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people who cared deeply for one another, and shared... in incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some kind of... well, adventure in living. Christ, you could see them trying to put their finger on it and ...
then .. . gradually figuring out there was something here they weren't in on ... Like the girl that afternoon in somebody's cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn't constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and rocks across the floor ... But she was learning ... that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had the experience and those who have not—those who have been through that door and—
It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the way—this amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.
PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, I963 — AND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.
The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.
Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole setup—
and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the hell out of it and burning it up, calling it "the oldest living thing on Perry Lane," only they were giggling and yahooing about it, high as coons, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with,
but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son Chi-li —
—and none of them would have understood it, anyway, even if someone had told them what was happening. Kesey had already bought a new place in La Honda, California. He had already proposed to a dozen people on the Lane that they come with him, move the whole
then .. . gradually figuring out there was something here they weren't in on ... Like the girl that afternoon in somebody's cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn't constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and rocks across the floor ... But she was learning ... that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had the experience and those who have not—those who have been through that door and—
It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the way—this amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.
PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, I963 — AND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.
The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.
Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole setup—
and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the hell out of it and burning it up, calling it "the oldest living thing on Perry Lane," only they were giggling and yahooing about it, high as coons, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with,
but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son Chi-li —
—and none of them would have understood it, anyway, even if someone had told them what was happening. Kesey had already bought a new place in La Honda, California. He had already proposed to a dozen people on the Lane that they come with him, move the whole
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