V.

by Thomas Pynchon

So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.”

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?

The dog days have ended, the maijstral has ceased to blow. Soon the other wind called gregale will bring the gentle rains to solemnize the sowing of our red wheat.

Myself: what am I if not a wind, my very name a hissing of queer zephyrs through the carob trees? I stand in time between the two winds, my will no more than a puff of air.

Sunday there was rain, leaving me with memories. Rain seems to make them swell like bothersome flowers whose perfume is bittersweet.

Surely if war has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction.

There is, we are taught, a communion of saints in heaven. So perhaps on Earth, also in this Purgatory, a communion: not of gods or heroes, merely men expiating sins they are unaware of, caught somehow all at once within the reaches of a sea uncrossable and guarded by instruments of death.

Spring has come. Perhaps there are sulla blossoms in the country. Here in the city is sun, and more rain than is really necessary. It cannot matter, can it? Even I suspect the growth of our child has nothing to do with time. Her name-wind will be here again; to soothe her face which is always dirty. Is it a world anyone could have brought a child into?

Oh we were full of lyrical lines like “At the Phoenicia Hotel.” Free verse: why not? There was simply not the time to cast it into rhyme or metre, to take care with assonance and ambiguity. Poetry had to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex. Jury-rigged and not as graceful as it might have been. But it did the job; put the truth on record.

Thy will be done. I refuse to dwell on death because I know well enough that a young man, even here, dotes along in an illusion of immortality. But perhaps more on this island because we’ve become, after all, one another. Parts of a unity. Some die, others continue. If a hair falls or a fingernail is torn away, am I any less alive and determined?

I know of machines that are more complex than people. If this is apostasy, hekk ikun. To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Night fills the street like a black fluid; flows along the gutters, its current tugging at your ankles. As if the city were underwater; an Atlantis, under the night sea.

in dream there are two worlds: the street and under the street. One is the kingdom of death and one of life. And how can a poet live without exploring the other kingdom, even if only as a kind of tourist? A poet feeds on dream. If no convoys come what else is there to feed on?

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no “moments of truth.” It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one’s own unanswered.

Had it been hare-and-hounds all day? Had all residual music gone with the quick birds, or was there a waltz we’d only now dreamed? We stood in sawdust and wood chips from an unlucky tree. Azalea bushes waited for us across from the pavilion but the wind was the wrong way: from the future, driving all scent back to its past. Above, tall palms leaned over us, false-solicitous, casting blade-shadows.

Leaves of all trees in the park began to scrape at one another like the legs of locusts. Music enough.

In the trees, at the edges of eyes, we saw children. White flashes which could have been faces, or only the other sides of leaves, signalling storm.

I did—so I argued—love this woman with all there was in me to expedite or make secure any love: but here it was love in a growing dark: giving out, with no clear knowledge of how much was being lost, how much would ever be returned.

In the dusk her eyes had grown huge and filmed. I tried to look at the whites as we look at the margins of a page, trying to avoid what was written in iris-black.

we became twinned, symmetric, sharing pain, perhaps all we could ever share: her face began to go distorted, half with the strength it took to hurt me, half with what I was doing to her.

We had used our dead fingernails only to swage quick flesh; to gouge or destroy, not to probe the wards of either soul.

“God is soulless?” speculated Father Avalanche. “Having created souls, He Himself has none? So that to be like God we must allow to be eroded the soul in ourselves. Seek mineral symmetry, for here is eternal life: the immortality of rock. Plausible. But apostasy.”

I had no oil to anoint her organs of sense—so mutilated now—and so used her own blood, dipping it from the navel as from a chalice. Her lips were cold.

Out came Paola though, sleepy-eyed, benightgowned.

He felt let down and saw no other way to improve his outlook but to get laid. Unfortunately he was now afflicted by contraceptivelessness.

All things gathered to farewell.

They never locked doors: on the other side of this one he wandered automatic into the kitchen to check the table. A ham, a turkey, a roast beef. Fruit: grapes, oranges, a pineapple, plums. Plate of knishes, bowl of almonds and Brazil nuts. String of garlic tossed like a rich lady’s necklace across fresh bunches of fennel, rosemary, tarragon. A brace of baccale, dead eyes directed at a huge provolone, a pale yellow parmigian and God knew how many fish-cousins, gefülte, in an ice bucket.

Somebody was singing the old standard about how you always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all. Indeed, thought Rachel, but does Benny even love me? I love him. I think. There’s no reason why I should. She kept crying.

“Benny,” she said, “I’m sorry.” And later: “You don’t have to try not to hurt me. Only come home, with me, to bed. . . .” And much later, at her apartment, facing the wall, “You don’t even have to be a man. Only pretend to love me.”

In the mirror as she watched there bloomed a great flower of leprous-colored foam, out of his mouth and down both sides of his chin.

“Look,” coming up for air, “what did I tell you? Didn’t I warn you?” “People can change. Couldn’t you make the effort?” She was damned if she’d cry. “I don’t change.

Her eyes were dead, her nose French: the strength there and about the chin and lips made her resemble the classical rendering of Liberty. In all, the face was quite beautiful except for the eyes, which were the color of freezing rain.

Would it rain? The clouds hung like leprous tissue.

Under that light the color of her hair reduced to neutral browns, buffs.

“A decadence,” Itague put in, “is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.”

The tailor laughed, delighted, like a great fierce child. Acoustics of the room gave his mirthfulness a sepulchral ring.

Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on Earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation; they share the same landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street’s own.