Turns out The Stranger (aka Sam Elliot) was channeling Doc:
Doc said, “Look at them. There are your true philosophers, I think,” he went on, “that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.”
Cannery Row (pg 88)
Certainly more flattering than “Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris.”
