Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

like my own small luminary, he wrote home to Hendrik the older brother, the ruler of my Sign

Her old, intractable vice—she wants to cross seas, to connect countries between whom there is no possible rate of exchange. Her ancestors sang, in Middle Dutch,
I love you more than one wild boar, even if it were made of fine gold.
(Translated)
love incommensurate with gold, golden calf, even in this ease golden swine.

That reached her. Pirate only asked because he’s begun to suspect, darkly, any number of Someones Over Here. But to Katje a debt is for wiping out.

Pirate is having second thoughts, is what it is. He keeps recalling that Katje now avoids all mention of the house in the forest. She has glanced into it, and out, but the truth’s crystal sheets have diffracted all her audible words—often to tears—and he can’t quite make sense of what’s spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal itself.

“But where will you go?” Both of them hands in pockets, scarves tightly wrapped, stones the water has left behind shining black wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along the beach, each fragment so amazingly clear yet...
“I don't know. Where would be a good place?”
“The White Visitation,’ ” Pirate suggested."
‘The White Visitation’ is fine,” she said, and stepped into the void....

The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere.

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. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows,

What more do they want? 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 forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.

Unlike the Captain, he has never seen her as the loyal sister who'll free him from the cage. He dreams that release, but as a dark exterior Process that will happen, no matter what any of them may want. Whether she goes or stays. So, when Katje quits the game for good, he is silent.

He’s ashamed that he enjoys them so much—the word bitch, spoken now in a certain tone of voice, will give him an erection he cannot will down— afraid that, if not actually judged and damned, he’s gone insane.