Tom Robbins quote of the week:
" 'But look at you,' Sissy insisted. 'People come from all over to seek your help and you won't let them within forty yards.'
'What makes you think I have anything helpful to give them?'
...'You've told me lots of wonderful things. Don't be coy! You may not be an oracle- I don't know- but you're wise enough to help these people who seek you out, if you chose to.'
'Well I don't choose to.'
'Why not?' By then Sissy was so full of Chink semen she squished when she walked. She felt she had a right to probe his personality.
The old hermit sighed, though the grin never left his lips. 'Look,' he said, 'these young people who seek me out, they're wrong about me. They're looking at me through filters that distort what I am. They hear that I live in a cave on a butte, so they jump to the conclusion that I lead a simple life. Well, I don't and I won't and I wouldn't. Simplicity is for simpletons!' ... 'Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcochol. It's an antilife attitude. These 'simple' people who sit around in drab clothes in bleak rooms sipping peppermint tea by candlelight are mocking life. They are unwittingly on the side of death. Death is simple but life is rich. I embrace that richness, the more complicated the better. I revel in disorder and...'
'But your cave isn't disorderly,' protested Sissy. 'It's neat and clean.'
'...I set my cave in order knowing that life's disorder will only mess it up again. That's beautiful, that's right, that's part of the paradox. The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts.'
'The beauty of simplicity, you say? Then you do find value in simplicity. You've contradicted yourself.' ...
'Of course I've contradicted myself. I always do. Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves. And in their consistency, they contradict life.' "
--Even Cowgirls Get the Blues