The White Album: Essays

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

John often said if he slowed down he’d fall apart. Part of him wanted the speed, wanted the mayhem. As he matured, he probably would have grown past this. But for now, he was so used to getting himself out of scrapes and close calls, he found it necessary to feel the thin edge between thrill and destruction to lessen the weight of that which had be

a Time cover story which revealed that hippies “scorn money—they call it ‘bread’” and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.

This perfect recycling tended to present itself, in the narcosis of the event, as a model for the rest: like American political life itself, and like the printed and transmitted images on which that life depended. This was a world with no half-life. It was understood that what was said here would go on the wire and vanish.