"They are kids. Exactly. What pain do they feel that they need to take pill? Music, okay, too loud, so what. It is beautiful how they dance. But what pain do they feel too young to buy beer?"
"There's pain enough for everybody now," Eric told him.
****
Music devoured the air around them, issuing from enormous speakers
set among the ruined murals on facing walls. He began to feel an
otherwordliness, a strange arythmia in the scene.There was something infectuous in the air. It wasn't the music and lights alone that drew you in, the spectacle of massed dance in a theater stripped of seats and apint and history. Eric thought it might be the drug as well, the novo, spreading its effect from those who took it to those who did not. You caught what they had. First you were apart and watching and then you were in, and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one.
****
But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into eachother so they wouldn't shrivel up as individuals. The noise was nearly unbearable, taking root in his hair and teeth. He was seeing and hearing too much. But this was his only defense against the spreading mental state. Never having touched or tasted the drug, not even having seen it, he felt a little less himself, a little more the others, down there, raving. - Cosmopolis, pg. 125, 126,127
