Day Tripper By ROBERT STONE + VL, pgs 313/314

[Robin Landseadel]

An obituary from Robert Stone of Albert Hoffman who died this year:

	. . . Over his long life, Hofmann took LSD many times. He
	developed a personal mysticism involving nature, for which he
	had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant man decried
	in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation
	from the outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more
	conscious of it. In nature he saw “a miraculous, powerful,
	unfathomable reality.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28hofmann-t.html?ref=magazine

That “miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” gets echoed just  
about every time Pynchon mentions LSD:

		"Remember how the acid was? Remember that
	windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I
	knew .... "

	They had a look. "Vh-huh, me too. That you were never going to
	die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed
	to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was
	always their last big chip, when they thought they had the
	power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see
	through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."

	"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
	"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill
	up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for,
	and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is
	becoming just another way to claim our attention, so that
	beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they
	have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die.
	And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.

	"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it,
	we really had some fun."

	"And they never forgave us." Mucho went to the stereo and put
	on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes I and 2, and then they sat
	together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one
	they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside
	spread the lamp less wastes, the unseen paybacks, the
	heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free
	America of their childhoods even then was turning into.