Gravity's Rainbow

Criticism

Contemporary Reviews

• Michael Wood, "Rocketing to the Apocalypse" , The New York Review (1973)
• Richard Poirier, "Rocket Power", The Saturday Review (1973)
• Richard Locke, "One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years", The New York Times (1973)
• RZ Sheppard, "V. Squared", Time Magazine (1973)
• Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed Over Pynchon

Later

• M Keith Booker, « History Is Hard to Decode: On 50 Years of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” », Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)

Web Resources

• Pynchon Wiki: Gravity's Rainbow
• Pynchon-l
• The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow

Characters and Places

Diagram of characters

Summary

Part One. Beyond the Zero

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." - Werner von Braun

Quotes

Part One. Beyond the Zero

• What the dossiers call Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for - well, for getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them..."
• ...the images often changing scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you're apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate's career as a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own. This wasn't through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but just because he knew.
• 30. "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces' - to veer into any wind. As if...
• 30. "A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself - its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened - that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable..."
• 55. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.
• 72. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty...how else would They know?
• 75. And Black Wing has even found an American, a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing to go under light narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country.
• 77. Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him.
• 80. ...that absence of vertical interest...
• 81. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes. that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources...
• 81. The ba-sic theory is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes - will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind.
• 84. But a hardon, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.
• 85. ...a silent extinction beyond the zero.
• 86. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.
• 88. 'The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.' Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable - 'The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one said?
• 89. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages."
• 89. ..."but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."
• 90. Pavlov though that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite.
• 91. ...there must be more, beyond the sense, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger has to believe in."
• 92. We have lost them. No one listened to those early conversations - not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us , could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later were taken out to see.
• 97. ...she plays at this only... plays at playing.
• 100. God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together.
• 105. 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 foret the real business of the War is buying and selling.
• 105. 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.
• 105. The true war is a celebration of markets.
• 107. Indeed, why did she leave Shußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play - and be unable then to continue in the same spirit.
• 107. ...say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold.
• 122. ...pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I mean I'm not making them.
• 126. His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history - a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life.
• 126. ...nothing was fixed, everything could be changed...
• 131. (The War) wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity...Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness - not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At "The White Visitation" there's a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II.
• 135. ...banish the Adversary, destory the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are...
• 141-2. Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but part of them both. "When you've looked at how it really is," he asked once, "how can we, any of us, be separate?"
• 145. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing - not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind - if they do - for a moment, like dreams, can't be held or developed, and presently, go away.
• 146. ... and interface between the worlds, a sensitive.
• 147-8. ...part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme notes - it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us!
• 148. ...deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told.
• 153. There's no memory on his side: no personal record... and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply.
• 155. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?
• 155. ...look at all the forms of capitalistic expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction - ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer - all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.
• 156. She knows what she has to impersonate.
• 159. Not produce, not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems.
• 159. Try to design anything that way and have it work.
• 165. ...a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority...
• 165. ...messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape..."
• 165. Your are constrained over there (among the living), to follow it in time, one step after another. But here its possible to see the whole shape at once... 'shape' isn't really the right word... Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion?
• 166. But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.
• 167. These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go.
• 176. I only want to visit you. You want to possess me.
• 177. You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine". It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible...

Part Two. Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

• 187. What th' fuck's going on?
• 188. It's a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia filtering in.
• 193. Harvard's there for other reasons. The 'educating' part of it is just sort of a front.
• 194. Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here.
• 208. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.
• 209. ...all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel - where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit...
• 218. Do They never make mistakes, or...
• 228. ...if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous as a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires - on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for any extrahuman anxieties.
• 229. ...this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now... behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses?
• 237. Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
• 241. Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
• 244. What's happening is not clear.
• 249. Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
• 251. ...do you remember the way in, all the twists and turns? No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety, but there may not be time...
• 251. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
• 257. 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...
• 258. Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
• 258. It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.
• 260. It's Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!
• 262. Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
• 264. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness.
• 267. ...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.
• 275. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born.
• 277. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control.
• 278. How many changes does one get to be a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke?... Protagonist and antagonist in one... "Yang and Yin," whispers the Voice, "Yang and Yin..."

Part Three: In the Zone

• 281. Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over.
• 281. ...as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him...
• 283. Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not.
• 285. ...a smell from before his conscious memory begins... not a smell to be found out in the world - it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing... essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive. Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless... His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away...
• 286. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory.
• 288. But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long.
• 290. It's so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements.
• 291. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone.
• 292. Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
• 294. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren't any... It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' You only have to flow along with it.
• 297. Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all... No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror...
• 302. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it... but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns...
• 303. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. Thestatus of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence - some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty.
• 317. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.
• 317. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts...No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...
• 319. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same.
• 321. We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we...
• 322. North is death's region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Norhausen means dwellings in the north.
• 323. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he'd seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people.
• 324. Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature... He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood.
• 326-7. ...he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others... But it's no only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader.
• 333. There are no zones... No zones but the Zone.
• 348. ...what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction. Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other.
• 349. But 'addiction'? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. 'Compulsion'? Who is not compelled? 'Tolerance'? 'Dependence'? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan.
• 362. ...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.
• 362. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.
• 373. ...except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside.
• 391. 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 language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, taking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words.
• 412. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...
• 413. ...we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps - but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given...
• 414-5. Won't somebody take advantage of me? Just a slave with nobody to slave for. A-and who th' heck wants ta be free
• 415. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation...
• 419. In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder.
• 422. ...love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child...
• 425. Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that is why one is safest at the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse - the Ellipse of Uncertainty.
• 428. ...the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring.
• 430. I don't really want to be anywhere. I don't care.
• 430. Close to losing control, Pökler committed then his act of courage. He quit the game.
• 464. ...a Max Weber charisma... some joyful - and deeply irrational - force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail.
• 472. It's what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's based on that... but she must be more than an image, a promise to pay...
• 474. ...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...
• 489. In the Zone, in these days, there is endless simulation...
• 489. How probable is the Anubis in this estuary tonight?
• 490. That if he's been seeker and sought, well, he's also baited and bait.
• 490. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn't... What do I need that badly?
• 490-1. But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has opened behind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can't quite...
• 494. But mistakes are part of it too - everything fits, ja? learns patterns, adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the camera.
• 504. It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.
• 509. Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. Personal density... is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now... 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 ot 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 embankment.
• 516. It wasn't ever necessary to see around the entire Plan... really that's asking too much of anyone...
• 520. ...yes and now what if we - all right, say wwe are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed - natürlich - that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to "omunene," the eldest brother)... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness... even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us... But if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it...
• 521. It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distract... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more... The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms - it was only staged to look that way - but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...
• 521. We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...
• 523. You say other side? What do you mean? What other side?
• 525. Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom.
• 527. 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...
• 535. It is not clear if the midget knows that his reality is being discussed. another of this film's artful ambiguities.
• 537. It appears to be some very extensive museum, a place of many levels, and new wings that generate like living tissue - though if it all does grow toward some end shape, those who are here inside can't see it.
• 539. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.
• 540. To believe that each of Them will personally dies is also to believe that Their system will die - that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return.
• 541-2. At the moment I'm involved with the 'Nature of Freedom' drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do... regardless of what I believe, you see... I've been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over - as a kind of koan, I suppose. It's driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that's the whole point of it.
• 543. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history - and no one ever will.
• 543. Everyone here seems to be at least a double agent.
• 543. I can't even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be ? If he's to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?
• 549. Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith's shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.
• 567. ...film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.
• 597. ...a good half of the crowd are out in the foothills of unconsciousness, and the rest are not exactly sure what's going on.
• 616. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper...

Part Four: The Counterforce

• 621. "You're caught in tonality," screams Gustav. "Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of them are. YOu're too old. You'll never move beyong the game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment." "The Row is a game too."
• 624. ...where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don't always "make sense" back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful or insane).
• 626. ...and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural...
• 638. Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary - but it's only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system.
• 638. I means what They and Their hired psychiatrists call 'delusional systems.' Needless to say, 'delusions' are always officially defined. We don't have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.
• 638-9. ...if this is a "We-system," why isn't it at least thoughtful enough to interlock in a reasonable way, like They-systems do? "That's exactly it," Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide alarming grin, "They're the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements."
• 639. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History...
• 645. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there, The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight.
• 659. Everything is so remote now. I don't really know why they sent me out here. I don't know any more who Slothrop really was. There's a failure in the light. I can't see. It's all going away from me... "There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.
• 660-1. This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance... who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like... I haven't transcended. I've only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it's worse than being told you won't have to die by someone you can't believe in.
• 661. ...a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends.
• 662. How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn't I be going all the way in?
• 663. You will want cause and effect. All right.
• 664. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the one who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life - do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what!
• 664. It will look like the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different. Ha-ha!
• 666. He is the Zone's worst specter. He is malignant...
• 666. ...with the same reach toward another shape as words trying to make their way through dreams.
• 667. As long as the Anubis kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory could have been left so far behind that one day its "reality" wouldn't matter any more. Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.
• 667-8. ...there is a key, among the wastes of the World... and it won't be found on board the white Anubis because they throw everything of value over the side.
• 668. Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds?... sure, but which two? There's no counting on any positivism to save him... it only got in the way, made others impatient with him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was always just a tactic... it never let him feel any freer.
• 672. ...when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?
• 674. Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that. So far he's managed to escape his father's daily little death-plots - but nobody has said he has to keep escaping.
• 674. Travel here gets complicated - a system of buildings that move... certain paths aren't available to you... Your objective is not the King - there is no King - but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour.
• 676. There's no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made - at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.
• 676. ...with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally hight (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy - it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives).
• 695. Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know?
• 697. What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is - what if They're using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that?
• 699. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, such us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld.
• 699. What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
• 701. The basic problem... has always been getting other people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life? That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique - it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death... But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version - ours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it's going to happen anyway, what does it matter?
• 703. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination - not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge...
• 712. Plucked, hell - stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained."
• 712-3. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover know as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while.
• 713. They will use us. We will help legitimize Them, though They don't need it really, it's another dividend for Them, nice but not critical...
• 713. ...which is worse: living on as Their pet, or death? It is not a question he has ever imagined himself asking seriously. It has come by surprise, but there's no sending it away now, he really does have to decide, and soon enough, plausibly soon, to feel the terror in his bowels. Terror he cannot think away. He has to choose between his life and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise, but a decision to live, on Their terms...
• 720. Have you ever waited for it? wondering whether it will come from outside or inside?
• 720. ...human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrified to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally.To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong. Only nearly, because of the defection rate. A few keep going over to the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation...
• 721. He is now always the same, awake or asleep - he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have become one for him.
• 722. America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper - into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin - the latest name for that is Modern Analysis - but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.
• 722. In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas.
• 723. Fathers are the carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected...
• 724. I want to break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become...
• 725. It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see...
• 725 ...a controlled burning - breaking downward again, an uncontrolled explosion... this lack of symmetry leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in time tended to cut us off one from another. But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show us a kinder universe, more easygoing...
• 728. It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never could - they are as foolish as shields of paper... They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies... Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.
• 735. This is magic. Sure - but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly no the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.
• 735. ... before the Vertical Solution, all transport was, in effect, two-dimensional...
• 736. ...already stories gone beneath the soles of your shoes...
• 737. Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away... This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the Zone these days.
• 737. A Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks...
• 738. There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly - perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly - and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered.
• 738. Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky... to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's, death.
• 739. I am betraying them all... the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus.
• 739. "The end is too far," they whispered. "Go back. There are no stops on this branch..."
• 740. ...a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands-asshole, and a return toward innocence too.
• 740. He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept - "It's just got too remote"'s what they usually say).
• 741. Yeah, what we need isn't right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, OK, but without that grace? forget it. Do you - please - are you listening? This thing here works. Really does. It worked for me, but I'm out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it. But you. Rocky. You...
• 742. "Dying a weird death," Slothrop's Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, "the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life..."
• 742. Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering.
• 742. But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea...
• 743. A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the elevator ceiling as it rockets upward, and no way to get down. You separate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware of the other.
• 744. It may be too late to get home.
• 745. There is a move going on, under the rug. On the floor, 24 hours a day, pull back the rug sure enough there's that damn movie!... The title is New Dope, and that's what it's about, a brand new kind of dope that nobody's ever heard of. One of the most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the minute you take it you are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody what it's like, or worse, where to get any. Dealers are as in the dark as anybody. All you can hope is that you'll come across somebody in the act of taking (shooting? smoking? swallowing? some. It is the dope that finds you, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around with guns which are like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of life - pull the trigger and bullets are sucked back out of the recently dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible is actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaniment of a backwards gunshot (you can imagine what drug-ravaged and mindless idea of fun the daily soundediting on this turns out to be).
• 747. He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet hare are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power out own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
• 747. [The Tower tarot card signifies] ...any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.
• 749. If you're wondering where he's [Blicero] gone; look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low.
• 753. "Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.
• 754. When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
• 757. ...a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the Vessels...
• 760. The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.
• 760. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...