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Back to Zürich on an afternoon train, sleeping most of the way. He gets off at Schlieren, some ungodly dark hour, just in case They're watching the Bahnhof in town, hitches a ride in as far as the St. Pe-terhofstatt. Its great clock hangs over him and empty acres of streets in what he now reads as dumb malignity. It connects to Ivy League quadrangles in his distant youth, clock-towers lit so dim the hour could never be read, and a temptation, never so strong though as now, to surrender to the darkening year, to embrace what he can of real terror to the hour without a name (unless it's... no... NO. . . ): it was vanity, vanity as his Puritan forerunners had known it, bones and heart alert to Noth-ing, Nothing underneath the college saxophones melding sweetly, white blazers lipsticked about the lapels, smoke from nervous Fatimas, Castile soap vaporizing off of shining hair, and mint kisses, and dewed carna-tions. It was being come for just before dawn by pranksters younger than he, dragged from bed, blindfolded, Hey Reinhardt, led out into the autumnal cold, shadows and leaves underfoot, and the moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else—that none of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last…

What better place than Zürich to find vanity again? It's Reformation country, Zwingli's town, the man at the end of the encyclopedia, and stone reminders are everywhere. Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler ... who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his "intelligence" network, which operates these days under the title "Office of Strategic Services." But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone…

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 267 - 268)

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of. . .

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 257)

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death-death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowl. edge that it will die. . . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday— that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level- and be like you in-stead, simply here, simply alive..." The guest star retires down the corridors.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 230)

And Slothrop is yawning "What time is it?" and Darlene is swimming up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the con cussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket's rush comes swelling, elevated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop's penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast, palms and fingers in fear's pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong flickering on the shade, she's begun to wonder . . . about the two together ... but they're fucking now, and what does it matter, but God's sake why shouldn't this stupid Blitz be good for something? And who's that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveil-lance, would you say the next one will fall?

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 119 - 120)

“What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of mar-kets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere.”

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 103)