Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he’d seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.