Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

“In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people out here were meant to go down first. We’re expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don’t mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it’s not accessible to us. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire. . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It’s none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don’t deny it—known, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday...