User Profile

"They won't kill him. They know who he is. He worked in guidance, he was Schilling's best man, he knows more about integrating circuits than anybody they'll find outside of Garmisch now. The Russians are offering fantastic salaries better than the Americans and they'll let him stay in Germany, work at Peenemünde or the Mittelwerke, just like he used to. He can even escape, if that's what he wants, we have very good connections for that"

"But what if they did shoot him?" "No. They weren't supposed to." "Springer, this ain't the fuckin' movies now, come on." "Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then ... then ..."

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 527)

Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 519)

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now, It is the familiar "△t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now-what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved em-bankment. • • •

"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, "what are we ..." "What are we what?" "What?" "You said, What are we .., then you stopped." "Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say."

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 509)

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still... isn't the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited... and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to…

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 474)

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

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences… "’Want me here'? What for?"

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 395)

Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkom-mando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled "schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. ... The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, ana-lyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words. . . .

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 392)

"We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find that it will work for you. Mha-kayere. It means 'I am passed over.' To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, 1 think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things... dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact. • . a film of grease you can't even see, oil from a touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off-I've seen that happen ... rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that's all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself."

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 362)

"Think that stopped 'em?" Right up their ass, in four-part harmony:

There was a young fellow named Yuri, Fucked the nozzle right up its venturi. He had woes without cease From his local police, And a hell of a time with the jury.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 307)