My friend Kevin is a stout, husky fellow with a vigorous appetite. Being a graduate student of philosophy and literature he is always hungry. One day he and five classmates were invited to lunch by their teacher, Ms. Doctor Professor H. A kind, well-meaning but frugal woman, Professor H seated her six guests at the dining table in her home and set a platter holding exactly seven pork chops at the head of the table. Kevin, seated on her right, too hungry to waste time counting the pork chops, helped himself to two from the top and passed the platter on. Professor H——-meanwhile had gone back to her kitchen. She returned with the mashed potatoes and gravy just as the platter had nearly completed its round of the table. One pork chop remained. She sat down. The young man on her left, who had not yet served himself, looked at the last pork chop, then at his hostess. She looked at him. Both laughed, awkwardly. You take it, he said. Oh no, she said, you take it. I’m really not hungry, he said. I’m not either, really, she said. Kevin by this time had gobbled down everything on his plate; he reached across the table with his fork and stabbed the last pork chop. I’ll eat it, he said. And he did.

Moral? He who hesitates is second? No, Kevin explained to me, not at all. Remember the words of our Lord and Savior: “To him that hath much, much shall be given. But verily, from him that hath little, that little shall be taken away.” (Matthew, X:xii.)

Mark Jensen, looking at me, says, “We’ll stay here a couple of days. Who wants to climb another mountain?”

I creep back to my tent. I read the borrowed books.

I cough, I blow my nose, I read and finish Still Life with Woodpecker and try to imagine what the typical Tom Robbins reader (and there are millions) must be like. Well, first of all, she would be about twelve years old. She? No, it. It is about twelve years old, a thoroughly homogenized androgyne of neuter sex. It lives in California or north-central New Mexico, also likes Rod McKuen, studies kundalini yoga, loves stuffed koala bears, thinks the Whole Earth Catalog is a book, believes Bob “Dylan” is a poet and Neil Diamond a musician, disdains politics as “too political” and…enough! The soul staggers, sinking deep into the swampy muskeg of pop Kultur. Put it this way: one spoonful of Tom Robbins’s prose is enough to sicken the mind for hours. To read a Tom Robbins book from end to end is like chugalugging a quart of Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup. Or like—like the time a Supai Indian and I were stranded for two days at the head of Topocoba Trail at Grand Canyon waiting for a truck that arrived two days late. We had nothing with us to eat, absolutely nothing, but a straw basket full of overripe figs. We ate them.