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

“A market need 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...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engenieer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tensión, an then he will be destroyed.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.