Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

“Sa-a-a-ay.” It’s just occurred to him. “Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?” “Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you’re in, right now.” “Uh . . .”

Zürich baloney and rösti

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . “Meters per second” will integrate to “meters.” The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.

Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which is where Slothrop wishes he were now—all the way back with Katje, even lost as he might feel again, even more vulnerable than now—even (because he still honestly misses her), preserved by accident, in ways he can’t help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty each lover has only the other to protect him from. . . . Could he live like that? Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He’s had nothing to say to anyone about her. It’s not the gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness of image or by a name. . . . He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself . . .

barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings . . . they are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. . . .

The sun is well past its zenith

the journey without hysteresis,

The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.

Pulse after heavenwide pulse. Clouds, some in very clear profile, black and jagged, sail in armadas toward the Asian arctic, above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses, of mullein stalks, rippling out of sight, green and gray in the wind. An amazing wind. But he stands in the street, out in it, hitching his pants, lapel-points whipped rattling against his chest, cursing Army, Party, History—whatever has put him here.

Here she has become a connoisseuse of silences.

O, wie spurlos zerträte ein Engel den Trostmarkt.

The light of each common autumn keeps bringing the same free advice, each time a little less hopefully.

Tchitcherine’s horse is a version of himself—an Appaloosa from the United States named Snake.

how each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen, “the Great Catherine of the periodic table,” down to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns . . . and the brute opposition of the chessboard yielding, in this chemical game, to dance-figures in three dimensions, “four, if you like,” and a radically different idea of what winning and losing meant. . .

Connection? Of course there’s one. But we don’t talk about it.

The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there’s-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance—kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked.

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message. . . .

Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning.

The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric capital before the destruction—the fallow and long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete . . . except that here everything’s been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms open to the sky, wall-less rooms pitched out over the sea of ruins in prows, in crow’s-nests. .

He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and goodnight cigarettes.

The act is undivided. You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and

Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.

Ilse gazed back at him, no tears, eyes room after room strung into the shadows of an old prewar house he could wander for years, hearing voices and finding doors, hunting himself, his life as it might have been. . . . He could not bear indifference from her.

each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke

they are the faces of the tricorned messengers coming in from out of the long pikes, down past the elms, Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge of the Evening. Come with a message. They unwrinkle, though, if you keep looking. They smooth out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on the surface.

Among the hilarious graffiti of visiting mathematicians, that sort of thing,

Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder?

Overhead passes a skylight of yellow panes, many of them fallen out. Down the corridor, fuzzy patches of afternoon sun stagger along, full of mortar dust. He climbs a broken flight of steps that end in the sky. Odd chunks of stone clutter the way. From the landing at the top, the Spa stretches to country distances: handsome trees, graveyard clouds, the blue river.

A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer’s, but in the same way part of a deliberate pattern.

she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window.

The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent.

About halfway up Springer blows a tremendous fart that echoes for minutes across the historic ellipse, like now to do for you folks my anal impression of the A4. . . .

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .

Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but

“But what if they did shoot him?” “No. They weren’t supposed to.” “Springer, this ain’t the fuckin’ movies now, come on.” “Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You’d better enjoy it while you can. Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people’s prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then . . .”

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.

At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do . . . regardless of what I believe, you see . . . I’ve been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose. It’s driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that’s the whole point of it.

He is holding Katje now as if, in a moment, music will start, and they would dance.

Knowing it for a move there’s to be no going back from, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day when you’d rather have rain,

Is he drifting, or being led? The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists.

Townspeople break out beer, wine, bread, Quark, sausages. Gold-brown Kartoffelpuffer are lifted dripping hot from oil smoking in black skillets over little peat fires.

Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days. The War must’ve been lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets full of bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy with it.

“Follow the yellow-brick road,” hums Albert Krypton, on pitch, “follow the yellow-brick road,” what’s this, is he actually, yes he’s skipping. . . .

runcible spoons

c’mon, let’s not get any more paranoid than we have to. . . .”

the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston’s—and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.

that history as it’s been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air (who’ll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross. . . .