...the tendency is to push it as far as you can

The admissions committee had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous books. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile library. We had two Leaves of Grass, seventy-five pages of The Communist Manifesto, five sheets of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a salt shaker half full of O'Connor, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored Updikes, DeBoises, Sagans, Lao Tsus . . . and also a quart of Lovecraft, a quart of Dylan, a case of Borges, a pint of raw Eliot and two dozen American folk songs.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Travis County -- from Manor to Westlake, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious book collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that worried me was the Eliot. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an Eliot binge.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And I knew we'd get into that lofty stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now -- yes, it was time for a long stanza of Eliot. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on Eliot is to do up a lot of American folk songs -- not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through Barss and Lasnik.