V.

by Thomas Pynchon

And it looks like I’m never going to cease.

He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want.

Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?

Nothing but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places. No things. Had anyone told her about things?

You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths.

“There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report.”

(How many times had they stood this way: dwarfed horizontal and vertical by any plaza or late-afternoon? Could an argument from design be predicated on that instant only, then the two must have been displaceable, like minor chess pieces, anywhere across Europe’s board. Both of a color though one hanging back diagonal in deference to his partner, both scanning any embassy’s parquetry for signs of some dimly sensed opposition—lover, meal-ticket, object of political assassination—any statue’s face for a reassurance of self-agency and perhaps, unhappily, self-humanity; might they be trying not to remember that each square in Europe, however you cut it, remains inanimate after all?)

Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all “soul” means.

“What is humanity.” “You ask the obvious, ha, ha. Humanity is something to destroy.”

men were obsessed with politics almost as much as women with marriage.

in each case, loss was as unspecified as the proposition “love dies.” They flew off and were swallowed in the sky.

All of which went to support his private thesis that correction—along all dimensions: social, political, emotional—entails retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean.

What had interested him most were the accounts of Veronica, the only female besides the luckless Teresa who is mentioned in the journal. Sewer hands being what they are (favorite rejoinder: “Your mind is in the sewer”), one of the apocrypha dealt with an unnatural relationship between the priest and this female rat, who was described as a kind of voluptuous Magdalen. From everything Profane had heard, Veronica was the only member of his flock Father Fairing felt to have a soul worth saving.

All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic—those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered) were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian. Comic relief and villainy were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants.

Mafia is Ayn Rand

If she believed in Heroic Love, which is nothing really but a frequency, then obviously Winsome wasn’t on the man end of half of what she was looking for. In five years of marriage all he knew was that both of them were whole selves, hardly fusing at all, with no more emotional osmosis than leakage of seed through the solid membranes of contraceptive or diaphragm that were sure to be there protecting them.

“MYSAH,” she said, which is Crew talk for Make Yourself At Home.

we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of Eisenhower’s first term, fluttering bravely in history’s gray turbulence, signaling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy.

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

the Birth of Venus,

V.