Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

But Felipe’s particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock’s time scale is a lot more stretched out. “We’re talking frames per century,” Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, “per millennium!” Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, 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. . .