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Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Opera-tion, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus's estate, "The Birches," the foreplay is a game about who has the real power, who's had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty "Angelique" are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain... .

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 678)

But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral 7s consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out. "We're talking frames per century," Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, "per millennium!" Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it's been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice-to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air (who'll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross....

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 674)

Their two hearts pound, his for his danger, hers for Slothrop. She tells how her parents lived, her father a printer, married during his journey-manship, his wanderyears now stretched out to ten, no word where he's been since '42, when they had a note from Neukölln, where he had dossed down the night with a friend. Always a friend, God knows how many back rooms, roundhouses, print shops he slept single nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of Die Welt am Montag, sure of at least shelter, like everybody in the Buchdrucherverband, often a meal, almost certainly some kind of police trouble if the stay lasted too long—it was a good union. They kept the German Wobbly traditions, they didn't go along with Hitler though all the other unions were falling into line. It touches Slothrop's own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer's ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man's blood, though the World for him be always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort the bourgeois takes for real... did he run off leaflets against his country's insanity? was he busted, beaten, killed? She has a snapshot of him on holiday, someplace Bavarian, waterfalled, white-peaked, a tanned and ageless face, Tyrolean hat, galluses, feet planted perpetually set to break into a run: the image stopped, preserved here, the only way they could keep him, running room to room down all his cold Red suburbs, freemason's night to night... their aproned and sso kitchen way of going evening or empty afternoon in to study the △x's and △y's of his drifter's spirit, on the run —study how he was changing inside the knife-fall of the shutter, what he might've been hearing in the water, flowing like himself forever, in lost silence, behind him, already behind him.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 629)

No wonder. The cops go at busting these proceedings the way they must've handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War, moving in, mmm ja, with these flexible clubs, eyes tuned to the finest possibilities of threat, smelling of leather, of the wool-armpit rankness of their own fear, jumping little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old people, making them take off and shake out even boots and underwear, jabbing and battering in with tireless truncheonwork among the crying kids and screaming women. Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days. The War must've been lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets full of bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy with it.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 627)

"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)