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

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.

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.

--no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outward—praise be to God—for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow’s footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark.

"O little Jesus, for thee I long alway"
(Translated)

There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ.

Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight.