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

the ARF wing, in to the inner room where octopus Grigori oozes sullenly in his tank. In other rooms the dogs whine, bark shrilly in pain, whimper for a stimulus that does not, will never come,...
The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori’s attention is directed to the screen, where an image already walks. The camera follows as she moves (Katje recursion)

“Do you know what they have in mind, down there?”
Only that they’re brewing up something that involves a giant octopus.

as for faith... he can believe only in the one steel reality of the firearm he carries.

Indeed, if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ’s kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the world’s illusory light—only our prey. God could not be that cruel.

They are all brothers now, they and the humans who used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby they dream now of sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching over him and his dear face all night long.... It is the purest form of European adventuring.

For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in His Word is eternal life to be found ... And there are tears of happiness in the eyes of the dodoes.

Alas, their tragedy is to be the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech.”

“If the species were not such a perversion,” he wrote, “it might be profitably husbanded to feed our generations.

Frans could not know that except for a few others on the island of Reunion, these were the only dodoes in the Creation, and that he was helping exterminate a race.

The act of ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.

But if they were chosén to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?