Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight’s snow-sky, her own voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we’re so apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by one, voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding . . . often above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow not through Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her those child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn’t ready to take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them—that one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading. . . .