So what we would do is on a Friday night–after consuming heroic doses of various illicit substances–we would call up our hero: the superhuman, the electric centaur. That is, Buzz Osbourne. And we would read into his voicemail, passages from the book. In retrospect, the whole procedure was almost like a strange form of prayer. Here’s an exemplary passage, chosen at random:
They are twins, fitly mated & as either gains control of the unfortunate subject, his soul withers away and decays, and at last dies out. The souls of half the human race leave them long before they die. “They cover all the skin of him that hath the plague, from his head even to his foot.” Even the raw flesh of the heart becomes unclean with it. Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the path of the molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
