V.

by Thomas Pynchon

What submarine wonders at the floor of Mareotis! Lost country: houses, hovels, farms, water wheels, all intact. Did the narwhal pull their plows? Devilfish drive their water wheels?

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

How could you say they were people: they were money. What did he care about the love affairs of the English? Charity—selfless or erotic—was as much a lie as the Koran. Did not exist.

Nothing was coming. Nothing was already here.

Mountebank is a dying profession,” he’d reckon in his lighter moments. “All the good ones have moved into politics.”

Since those days as we know democracy has made its inroads and those crude flying-machines have evolved into “weapon systems” of a then undreamed-of complexity; so that the maintenance man today has to be as professional-noble as the flight crew he supports.

Perhaps he saw an end also to this unrequited love; doesn’t a latent sense of death always heighten the pleasure of such an “involvement”?

Profane had: come to a new road, right-angles to his progress, smelled the Diesel exhaust of a truck long gone—like walking through a ghost—and seen there like a milestone one of them. Whose limp might mean a brocade or bas-relief of scar tissue down one leg—how many women had looked and shied?—; whose cicatrix on the throat would be hidden modestly like a gaudy war decoration; whose tongue, protruding through a hole in the cheek, would never speak secret words with any extra mouth.)

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.

“It has to harmonize with the rest of your face, you see.” It didn’t, of course. All that could harmonize with a face, if you were going to be humanistic about it, was obviously what the face was born with.

So, Esther’s nose. Identical with an ideal of nasal beauty established by movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations. Cultural harmony, Schoenmaker called it.

Esther watched his eyes as best she could, looking for something human there.

bums from across both rivers (or just in from the Midwest, humped, cursed at, coupled and recoupled beyond all remembrance to the slow easy boys they used to be or the poor corpses they would make someday);

It was hard to see if it was melted sleet running down his face, or tears.

Pride you could exchange for nothing at all.

“Hey,” called Mafia from the writing desk. “How do you spell Prometheus, anybody.” Winsome was about to say it started off like prophylactic when the phone rang.

her breath light and acid with wine.

Why? Why did she have to behave like he was a human being. Why couldn’t he be just an object of mercy.

They cultivated a carefully sinister image: coal-black velvet jackets with the clan name discreetly lettered small and bloody on the back; faces pale and soulless as the other side of the night (and you felt that was where they lived: for they would appear suddenly across the street from you and keep pace for a while, and then vanish again as if back behind some invisible curtain); all of them affecting prowling walks, hungry eyes, feral mouths.

He wasn’t angry with her. He looked that thought at her, but who knew what went on in those eyes?

She’d have been born in 1942. Wars don’t have my beat. They’re all noise.

It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion.

Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling of switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles appeared among the crowd in the street.

Fina was borne up by a swarm of pneumatically fat, darling cherubs, to hover over the sudden peace she’d created, beaming, serene.

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

He sat in an anteroom full of tropical hothouse growths while the wind streamed bleak and heatsucking past the windows.

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.

Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief—financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss—until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at.

He mused inviolate by the serene river of Italian pessimism, and all men were corrupt: history would continue to recapitulate the same patterns. There was hardly ever a dossier on him, wherever in the world his tiny, nimble feet should happen to walk. No one in authority seemed to care. He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers whose eyesight was clouded over only by occasional tears, whose outer rim was tangent to rims enclosing the Decadents of England and France, the Generation of ’98 in Spain, for whom the continent of Europe was like a gallery one is familiar with but long weary of, useful now only as shelter from the rain, or some obscure pestilence.

The sun hovered over the Arno. Its declining rays tinged the liquid gathering in Signor Mantissa’s eyes to a pale red, as if the wine he’d drunk were overflowing, watered down with tears.

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, the Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway.”

she felt that skill or any virtù was a desirable and lovely thing purely for its own sake; and it became more effective the further divorced it was from moral intention.

“Perhaps we are in limbo,” he said. “Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there’s no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence.” “Perhaps nowhere in the world.”

“Politics is a kind of engineering, isn’t it. With people as your raw material.”

her desire seemed to arise out of a nostalgic sensuality whose appetites knew nothing at all of nerves, or heat, but instead belonged entirely to the barren touchlessness of memory.

The transvestite lieutenant had parted his hair in the middle and larded his eyelashes with mascara; these, batting against his lenses, left dark parallel streaks so that each eye looked out from its own prison window.

Usually the most you felt was annoyance; the kind of annoyance you have for an insect that’s buzzed around you for too long. You have to obliterate its life, and the physical effort, the obviousness of the act, the knowledge that this is only one unit in a seemingly infinite series, that killing this one won’t end it, won’t relieve you from having to kill more tomorrow, and the day after, and on, and on . . . the futility of it irritates you and so to each individual act you bring something of the savagery of military boredom, which as any trooper knows is mighty indeed.

There was constant battle between the fog, which wanted to freeze your marrow, and the sun; which, once having burned off the fog, sought you.

only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindleshaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

They leaned toward the battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons the sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets; lips blackened with yesterday’s wine, nicotine, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the original hue only showed in cracks. Aging women shifted their legs frequently, makeup they’d not cleaned away clinging in blotches to pore-riddled cheeks.

The sun was going down. The clouds had been blown terribly thin, and begun to glow red, and seemed to ribbon the sky its entire length, filmy and splendid, as if it were they that held it all together.

there bloomed at last six explosions, sending earth, stone and flesh cascading toward the nearly black sky with its scarlet overlay of cloud. Seconds later the loud, coughing blasts, overlapping, reached the roof. How the watchers cheered.

Some of them would go through the old Northern liberal routine: look at me, I’ll sit with anybody. Either that or they would say: “Hey fella, how about ‘Night Train’?” Yes, bwana. Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol’ Uncle McClintic, he play you de finest “Night Train” you evah did hear. An’ aftah de set he gwine take dis ol’ alto an’ shove it up yo’ white Ivy League ass.

These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world which simply doesn’t care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under “Disasters”—which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.

It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the worst time of the year. Time for rumbles in the park and a lot of kids getting killed; time for tempers to get frayed, marriages to break up, all homicidal and chaotic impulses, frozen inside for the winter, to thaw now and come to the surface, and glitter out the pores of your face.

Wars begin in August. In the temperate zone and twentieth century we have this tradition. Not only seasonal Augusts; nor only public wars.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humors we do go in and out of. It may be only the room—a cube—having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.

That is the room. To say the mattress was begged from the Navy B.O.Q. here in Valletta shortly after the war, the stove and food supplied by CARE, or the table from a house now rubble and covered by earth; what have these to do with the room? The facts are history, and only men have histories. The facts call up emotional responses, which no inert room has ever showed us.