Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

“Of course not,” Sammy sez. “Would you—really—trust any of us?” “Oh, no,” Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else’s. But it’s still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.

for the innocent and the fools who are going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences at the city pounds

you been, gate?” “‘Here.’” “‘“Here”’?” “Yes, like that, you’ve got it—once or twice removed like that, but

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back—maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up.

She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room . . . still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.

All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls now sedate, bathing beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians, google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart urchins, lounge lizards and movie queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks, flying aces, motorboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men, chefs in chefs’ hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comic-book cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high-society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, taxidancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati.

With him is what appears to be a gigantic, multicolored pig, the plush nap of its coat reversed here and there, which widens the possible range of colors. “Micrograms,” Krypton striking his head dramatically, “that’s right, micrograms, not milligrams. Birdbury, gimme something, I’ve OD’d.”

she stands with long legs braced for their rattling creaking 60 or 70 miles an hour and Bodine’s strange cornering techniques, which look to be some stylized form of suicide.

Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see.

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. . .

Quimporto—a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port—with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion.

Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness.

She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he’s never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as “pretty” . . . but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

“I-say,” sez Rózsavölgyi, again. “You say, ‘I say’? Is that it? Then you should have said, ‘I say, “I say.”’” “I did.” “No, no—you said, ‘I say,’ once, is what you—” “A-ha! But I said it again. I-said it . . . twice.” “But that was after I asked you the question—you can’t tell me the two ‘I say’s were both part of the same statement,” unless, “that’s asking me to be unreasonably,” unless it’s really true that, “credulous, and around you that’s a form of,” that we’re the same person, and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that means, “insanity, Rózsavölgyi—”

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that. There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you.

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.”

“‘Ass’ is an intensifier,” Seaman Bodine now offers, “as in ‘mean ass,’ ‘stupid ass’—well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’” “But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects. “But gee that don’t make it mean forwards,”

There were men called “army chaplains.” They preached inside some of these buildings. There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened. Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and some died before they got back inside a garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

North? What searcher has ever been directed north? What you’re supposed to be looking for lies south—those dusky natives, right? For danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what’s north?

playing viola is Gustav’s accomplice in suicidally depressing everybody inside 100 meters’ radius wherever they drop in

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense. “It is another of my damned ‘touches,’” Fritz Lang said. “At the Creation,” explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, “God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1–10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully. “Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called ‘Major Arcana’ in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity.