A New Gnostic Kook Book

Education and Ecstasy By George B. Leonard

It is entirely appropriate that so pristine, so unmodulated a Gnostic should appear there, where the cultural context is so thin as to provide little mediation, little restraint, no atmospheric sense of limitation and probability. The sun beats down. The hot wind blows in across the desert. As Joan Didion recalls: “The Forty Winks Motel: Nineteen Stucco Tepees; sleep in a wigwam—get more for your wampum.” Big Sur. Disneyland. Bishop Pike. LSD. A woman says that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans over the Les Crane Show. Joan Baez. At the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, is in a deep-think seminar with Dinah Shore.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Education and Ecstasy By George B. Leonard

It is entirely appropriate that so pristine, so unmodulated a Gnostic should appear there, where the cultural context is so thin as to provide little mediation, little restraint, no atmospheric sense of limitation and probability. The sun beats down. The hot wind blows in across the desert. As Joan Didion recalls: “The Forty Winks Motel: Nineteen Stucco Tepees; sleep in a wigwam—get more for your wampum.” Big Sur. Disneyland. Bishop Pike. LSD. A woman says that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans over the Les Crane Show. Joan Baez. At the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, is in a deep-think seminar with Dinah Shore.