The Bicycle and the Myth

“Bicycle Day has been celebrated on April 19 since 1985. The image of the bicycle is important, not dramatic, almost domestic. The most consequential trip in pharmacological history was a commute.”

The bicycle is important.

Hofmann did not have a mystical experience in a mountaintop cave or a darkened laboratory. The effects came on as he rode his bicycle home, escorted by his laboratory assistant because wartime restrictions left no car. At home he asked for milk, and the neighbor who brought it looked to him like a malevolent witch in a colored mask. He lay down and wondered whether he was dying.

The domesticity of the setting is part of what Bicycle Day commemorates, whether its celebrants know it or not. The most radical perceptual event of the twentieth century happened on a commute.

Hofmann was 37 years old. He was a chemist doing normal pharmaceutical research. The compound he had returned to out of a hunch turned out to be active at doses too small to weigh.

The bicycle is the mundane container for the extraordinary content. This is appropriate, because what Hofmann discovered was not that the extraordinary exists at some great distance from ordinary life, it was that the ordinary, perceived directly, is the extraordinary. The flowers the morning after were ordinary flowers. The world was luminous because it was exactly itself.

Bicycle Day should be celebrated for the bicycle, not despite it.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)