The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City's limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at once dream-like and real.
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"The harsh nonfictional world"
In plot terms, the "real" world of Pynchon's Against the Day America. In book terms, the actual real world that exists outside Against the Day's limits.
"at once dream-like and real"
The Fair seemed "dream-like and real," a seeming paradox, because it was both a highly manufactured imaginative setting and set outside of reality within its own walls. So it was dream-like in its construction, exhibits, and state-of-the-art technology and architecture. But it was real in that it was a bubble unto itself. The outside world could not intrude so that a person, while within it, knew only the reality of the Fair. Dream-like. And real.
My ultimate goal is for my reality to seem dream-like. There are a handful of moments in my life when I have achieved this reality, if only for the most transient of moments. Perhaps not the most serene but quite close is one I think about fondly: I was sat cross-legged on the living room carpet in the middle of a friend's sister's high school party, tripping pleasantly on LSD, sipping on a can of who-can-even-remember-what-brand beer and just watching the revelry. Nobody disturbed me, seemingly seeing nothing wrong with my position, as if I were an ottoman or an end table. I wouldn't mind still being there. And perhaps I am, in a way.
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