Xavier

“Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth's own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world's light.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“This process of gradual guarded disclosure is also illustrated by some of the mythology and a few of the facts associated with heterosexual life in our society. The sexual relation is defined as one of intimacy with the initiative allocated to the male. In fact, courting practices involve a concerted aggression against the alignment between the sexes on the part of the male, as he attempts to maneuver someone for whom he must at first show respect into a position of subordinate intimacy.*33 However, an even more aggressive action against the alignment between the sexes is found in situations where the working consensus is defined in terms of superordination and distance on the part of a performer who happens to be a woman and subordination on the part of a performer who happens to be a man. The possibility arises that the male performer will redefine the situation to emphasize his sexual superordination as opposed to his socio-economic subordination.*34 In our proletarian literature, for example, it is the poor man who introduces this redefinition in regard to a rich woman; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as has often been remarked, is a clear-cut example. And when we study service occupations, especially lowly ones, inevitably we find that practitioners have anecdotes to tell about the time they or one of their colleagues redefined the service relation into a sexual one (or had it redefined for them). Tales of such aggressive redefinitions are a significant part of the mythology not only of particular occupations but also of the male subculture generally.”
― Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

“The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly - most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire - but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man