Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting— reli-gious, 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. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard in-ages now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that reason...

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon