Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot last winter in England for Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has somehow brought them into being. “It is my mission,” he announces to Squalidozzi, with the profound humility that only a German movie director can summon, “to sow in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation. What I can do for the Schwarzkommando I can do for your dream of pampas and sky. . . . I can take down your fences and your labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to the Garden you hardly remember. . . .”