Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction. Because of the symmetry. He’s been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results... in assuming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image—“irradiation,” for example and “reciprocal induction”...and who'd ever said that either had to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons,

When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don’t automatically assume that it’s cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment.... He owes Spectro that much. Even if the American’s not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology ought to be traced, the treatment found.

But... what about the dogs? Pointsman knows them. He’s deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no secrets. He can drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring them back. But Slothrop..,
So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He should sleep but he can’t. It has to be more than the simple conditioning of a child, once upon a time.

But now with Slothrop in it—sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise, whatever he is... will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a go at the Minotaur after all?

an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic safety, among whose clusters of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed he’s unable to escape completely because of how always the Reichssieger persists,

Here’s a medium shot, himself backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky glass tipped at the bright sub- arctic sky and here’s to you then, chaps, it'll be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to survive that’s all...

Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go....

Later, when you're older, you'll know, they said. Yes and it grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime, oh my, how right they were.

A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in?
(Rituals are institutions of life?)

I should... should have. ... There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many “should haves”— should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes... why couldn’t he? A silly bleeding smile, why not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic?

Why not renounce the Book then Ned, give it up that’s all, the obsolescent data, the Master's isolated moments of poetry, it’s paper that’s all, you don’t need it, the Book and its terrible curse... before it’s too late.... Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous—but before whom? Who's listening?

the Poisson dispensation ruling not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per year...

with each one (rocket firebloom) the Lord further legitimizes his State, and we who cannot find him, even to see, come to think of death no more often, really, than before...and, with no warning when they will come, and no way to bring them down, pretend to carry on as in Blitzless times. When it does happen, we are content to call it “chance.” Or we have been persuaded.

Spectro hurrying away with a syringe for his Fox, when nothing can really stop the Abreaction of the Lord of the Night unless the Blitz stops, rockets dismantle, the entire film runs backward: faired skin back to sheet steel back to pigs to white incandesence to ore, to Earth. But the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound of arrival, is a mockery (...) of the reversible process:

only rarely finding opportunity to swap information on therapies or symptoms. Yes, one would expect more of a link. Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out, it's not.

The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro... auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror’s, all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialectic it seems to imply.

Pointsman alone, sneezing helplessly in his dimming bureau, the barking from the kennels flat now and diminished by the cold, shaking his head no... in- side me, in my memory... more than an “event”... our common mortality ... these tragic days.

No clue where this book is going. The whole thing so far has been absolutely insane and maybe the grossest book I’ve read, but so far I really love it

Then silence, Another “event” for Roger Mexico, a roundheaded pin to be stuck in his map, a square graduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out the threes prediction, which lately’s being lagged behind.

half of St. Veronica’s hospital in the morning smashed roofless as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered as the snow, and poor Spectro picked off, lighted cubbyhole and dark ward subsumed in the blast and he never hearing the approach, the sound too late, after the blast, the rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it newly made.

It was Thomas Gwenhidwy, come down all the way from London, with the news about poor Spectro. You slept through the loud squadrons roaring without letup, but Gwenhidwy’s small, reluctant tap woke you. Something like what happens on the cortex of Dog during the “paradoxical” phase.