Stand high long enough and your lightning will come. - William Gibson

When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see? So we’ve always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us — never mind. We've always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but is real.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners — your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were.