Tom Robbins is my hero. I chuckle happily at his puns and outrageous similes and metaphors, but I whole-heartedly embrace his philosophy that life can be joyful and free. Ignore the nay-sayers, he seems to say. A parrot in Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates repeats, “Peeples of ze world, relax.”
In an introduction to Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, a book of his essays, he writes, “Serious Reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there’s some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace.”
This supports my thesis in an earlier blog on the purpose of sex scenes in literature. Reading a really good novel is an intimate experience.
When asked, “What is the Meaning of Life?” by Life Magazine in 1991, Robbins answered, “Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among wild apple trees.
“Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good, thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.”
Notice he didn’t write “pizza and a beer.” He specifies with adjectives, always.
I know I can’t write like Tom Robbins does. But reading him encourages me to write like I do.
Tags: Tom Robbins
