Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder.

Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

There was a young fellow named Pope, Who plugged into an oscilloscope. The cyclical trace Of their carnal embrace Had a damn nearly infinite slope.

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly.

“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?”

there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank,

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here,

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

“In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe.

Yes, well, he’s an ex-scientist now, one who’ll never get Into It far enough to start talking about God, apple-cheeked lovable white-haired eccentric gabbing from the vantage of his Laureate—no he’ll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium . .