Art by Yang Yongliang
LAG
” A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and the time you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you’re the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now, Cassady is right up against that one-thirtieth of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can’t overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can’t be done. You can’t go any faster than that. You can’t through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least one-thirtieth of a second ago. We think we’re in the present , but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some sort of breakthrough.”
~ Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
