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

“Oh, ha, ha,” he sez instead. “Talking to myself, here. Little—sort of—eccentricity, heh, heh.” “Yang and Yin,” whispers the Voice, “Yang and Yin... .”

“Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever. Your winter anxieties about the End of History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of your biography now like any old bad dream. But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands. a Mexico's girl friend there is a threat to your whole enterprise. He will do anything to hold on.

Nothing will remain, for example, of the tentative findings of Freudian Edwin Treacle and his lot, who toward the end even found themselves at odds with their own minority, the psychoanalytic wing of Psi Section. It began as a search for some measurable basis for the common experience of being haunted by the dead. After a while colleagues began to put in chits requesting they be transferred out.

Slothrop thinks he’s chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even now

So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the “...”

And yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gédel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us... something will,

What would her idea of love be....
“Mexico,” grabbing the young statistician’s arm.
“Eh?” Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hayworth in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean back...
“Mexico, I think I am hallucinating.”
“Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?”
“Mexico, I see...I see... What do you mean, what am I seeing, you nit? It’s what I’m hearing.”

Perhaps what’s bothering him most right now is her connection, if any, with Pirate Prentice. Prentice has been down to “The White Visitation” several times asking rather pointed questions about her.

Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop’s disappearance. Here’s a man running loose who knows everything it’s possible to know—not only about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the A4.

we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this.”