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

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?)