Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

“it’s the damned Calvinist insanity again. Payment. Why must they always put it in terms of exchange?

Then he has shaken them off, left the last Negro touch back up there and is free, slick as a fish, with his virgin asshole preserved.

The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish.

“but I wonder if you people aren’t a bit too—well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you’ve taken it all apart, fine, I’ll be first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?”

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.

Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.

Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out, it’s not.

“look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.”

Here’s Bloat ten feet away offering him a large crab.

Slothrop quickly snatches up the crab again, dangling it so the octopus can see, and begins to dance the creature away, down the beach, drool streaming from its beak, eyes held by the crab.

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health,

The what, The Seltzer Bottle? What shit is this, now? What other interesting props have They thought to plant, and what other American reflexes are They after? Where’s those banana cream pies, eh?

“Fuck you,” whispers Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.

By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others.

They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean-Claude Gongue, notorious white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slaving.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do

A tragic sigh. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

They were gently experimented with: exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirées, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls.

It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern.

Connection? Of course there’s one. But we don’t talk about it.

Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having been asshole enough to drink out of an ornamental pond in the Tiergarten, took sick.

Jeepers, Slothrop hasn’t seen a potato for months. There’s onions in a sack too, and even wine. She cooks, and they both sit there just pigging on those spuds.

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

The Pope’s staff is always going to remain barren, like Slothrop’s own unflowering cock.

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down.

Fritz is an old hand, and has thoughtfully brought along a glazed jug of some liquid brain damage flavored

It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little.

But here is the true Golden Bitch.

She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it.

You will want cause and effect. All right.

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

No one Slothrop has listened to is clear who’s trying whom for what, but remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures.

“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.”

“‘Ass’ is an intensifier,” Seaman Bodine now offers, “as in ‘mean ass,’ ‘stupid ass’—well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’” “But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects.

Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They don’t want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an “aether,” which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether.

A cow sez moo.

Showing that no society can protect, never could—they are as foolish as shields of paper.

The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl.