V.

by Thomas Pynchon

One thing he had to give her credit for, she’d never called it a Relationship. “What is it then, hey,” he’d asked once. “A secret,” with her small child’s smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.

If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.

“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.”

Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all “soul” means. Events between soul and soul are not God’s direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue.

Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and an eye that receives.

What could he do toward eliminating the causes? They existed, formed a body of things-as-they-are; he came to be afflicted with a conservative laziness. It was social awareness of a sort, but with boundaries and interfaces which made it less than the catholic rage filling him that night in the barracks with the M.O. It was in short a deterioration of purpose; a decay.

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.

“You’re late,” Zeitsuss called. So he was, Stencil thought. Years.

On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

This was on Broadway in the Eighties, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken heart for every light on it. Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it.

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.