Still Life With Woodpecker - Tom Robbins

Once again, Tom Robbins strikes gold.

Still life with Woodpecker is a genius love story. Yet its not your cliché love story (It’s Tom Robbins; nothing is cliché). It holds all the imagination and randomness of any good Tom Robbins book.

To me it was somewhat mysterious. Theres a highlight on inanimate objects, but what its saying is hard to catch. Is it mocking our attachment to inanimate objects? Or is it saying we take some things for granted? Is it disrespecting love? Is it belittling royalty? Is it persuading yoTu to care more about the world you live in? Is it asking you to make a difference? Or is it wondering why we care so much about things we can’t control? Is it calling us shallow and self-centered, or over anxious and stressed? Oh Tom Robbins.. I do love you. :)


See what you think. Here’s some quotes:

"'Neoteny' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Human s are the most advanced of mammals- although a case could be made for the dolphins- because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, whit it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

“In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariable lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.”

“Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.”

“All the romantic bullshit that makes life interesting. People need that as badly as they need fair prices at the Texaco pump and no DDT in the Pablum.”

“Bullshit. Unromantic, unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

“There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, it’s not straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuk.”

“It’s not at all unusual for love to remain for a lifetime. It’s passion that doesn’t last. I still love my first husband. But I don’t desire him. Love lasts. It’s lust that moves out on us when we’re not looking, it’s lust that always skips town – and love without lust just isn’t enough.”

“Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl’s gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord’s last pratfall, and after all that time we still don’t know where passion goes when it goes.”

“When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”

“A successful external reality depends upon an internal vision that is left intact.”

“Plato did claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.”

“Who shall control those who control those who control?”

“The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible. The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love. The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed. The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends. The word that fires evolution’s motor of mud. The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar. The word that molecules recite before bonding. The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living. The word no mirror can turn around. In the beginning was the word and the word was CHOICE.”

“Of a couple, one person invariably loved stronger than the other. It seemed a law of nature, a cruel law that led to tension and destruction. She was dismayed that a law so unfair, so miserable prevailed, but since it did, since imbalance seemed inevitable, it must be easier, healthier to be the lover who loved the least.”

“How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding – escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience – maybe those people, people who won’t talk to rednecks, or if they’re rednecks won’t talk to intellectuals, people who’re afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar’s Hell. Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it’s mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it – and if they never do, they’ll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth’s sweet gas.”


Just as with all Tom Robbins’ Books: Highly Recommended :)