Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

But it’s not only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake . . . he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but now it is finding him again. . . .