Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes. Not the kind of shiver normal people get, the goose-on-the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that doesn’t stop. Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a connoisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way, to read them, like Säure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos Thanatz reads whipscars. But the gift isn’t limited just to Eddie’s own shivers, oh no, they’re other peoples’ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in all together in groups (lately he’s been growing in his brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning how to separate them out). Least interesting of these shivers are the ones with a perfectly steady frequency, no variation to them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the frequency-modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on information put in at the other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular waveforms that change both in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier-analyzed into their harmonics, which is a little tougher. There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies, certain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the hang of these.

She comes riding into town on a stolen bicycle: a white kerchief at her crown, fluttering behind in points, a distinguished emissary from a drained and captured land, herself full of ancient title, but nothing in the way of usable power, not even a fantasy of it. She’s wearing a lean white dress, a tennis dress from prewar summers, falling now not in knife-edge pleats but softer, more accidental, half-crisp, touches of blue in its deeper folds, a dress for changes in the weather, a dress to be flowed upon by shadows of leaves, by a crumble of brown and sun-yellow moving across it and on as she coasts preoccupied but without private smiles, under the leafy trees that line the road of hard-packed dirt. Her hair is wound, in braids, up on her head, which she holds not too high nor what used to be called “gravely,” but toward (say against) a particular future, for the first time since the Casino Hermann Goering . . . and she’s not of our moment, our time, at all.

That’s getting hit by lightning, folks. You’re way up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don’t think there aren’t lammergeiers cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off. Oh yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic masks around their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity symbol: ∞. Little men with wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of them are wearing outlandish headgear,

It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as “the glozing neuters of the world” have no easy road to haul down,

“Jess—” shit is he going to cry? he can feel it building like an orgasm—

all your faces drowning in the same selfless look—the moirés of personality softening, softening, each sweep of surf a little more out of focus till all has become subtle grades of cloud—all

overhead a magnificent sky, marble carried to a wildness of white billow and candescence

and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t.

Last night I threw a party for my mind,

Who cares what he was thinking about, long as it didn’t get in the way? A-and it doesn’t even matter why we’re doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we need isn’t right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, O.K., but without that grace? forget it. Do you—please, are you listening?

Gustav and André, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed-holder and reed from André’s kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil—punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke—turns out sly Säure has had ex-Peenemünde engineers, propulsion-group people, working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and guess what—in terms of flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke ratio, the perfect shape turns out to be that of the classical kazoo!

devotees of the I Ching who have a favorite hexagram tattooed on each toe, who can never stay in one place for long, can you guess why? Because they always have I Ching feet!

yeah they’re all showing up at Der Platz these days. But the alternative is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody’s ready for that. . . . Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high, watching us at our many perversities, crawling across black satin, gagging on whip-handles, licking the blood from a lover’s vein-hit, all of it, every lost giggle or sigh, being carried on under a sentence of death whose deep beauty the angel has never been close to. . . .

He appears first with boots and insignia shining as the rider on a black horse, charging in a gallop neither he nor horse can control, across the heath over the giant grave-mounds, scattering the black-faced sheep, while dark stands of juniper move dreamily, death-loving, across his path in a parallax of unhurrying fatality, presiding as monuments do over the green and tan departure of summer, the dust-colored lowlands and at last the field-gray sea, a prairie of sea darkening to purple where the sunlight comes through, in great circles, spotlights on a dancing-floor.

Of 77 cards that could have come up, Weissmann is “covered,” that is his present condition is set forth, by The Tower. It is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.

(what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you don’t think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians around, well you better think again!).

Perhaps he is to be given only what he must walk away from.

“I have a fantasy about how I’ll die. I suppose you’re on their payroll, but that’s all right. Listen to this. It’s 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Freeway, a warm night. All my windows are open. I’m doing about 70, 75. The wind blows in, and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a common dry-cleaning bag: it comes floating in the air, moving from behind, the mercury lights turning it white as a ghost . . . it wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don’t know it’s there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death. . . .”

The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple.

“The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people all wishing on the first star. . . . Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep . . .” Always remember. The first star hangs between his feet. Now—