Gravity's Rainbow

If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall.

From conspiracies so mild, so domestic, from the serpent coiled in the teacup, the hand’s paralysis or eye’s withdrawal at words, words that could frighten that much, to the sort of thing Spectro found every day in his ward, extinguished now... to what Pointsman finds in Dogs Piotr, Natasha, Nikolai, Sergei, Katinka—or Pavel Sergevich, Varvara Nikolaevna,

The people inhale it, and grow more tranquil.

On certain days the wind brings aspirin-dust from the Bayer factory.

"I'm here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should air them, honestly, man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don't you think I've had doubts? Even Stalin's had them. We all have."

Dancing the bad dream a-way…

that's bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemunde sunsets in the chill slow firing-weather…

"The light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain's and Abel's, Gerhardt told us. It was at the height of his symbolist period. Later on he began to use more natural light, to shoot more on location."

his tribe believed long ago that each sunset is a battle.

Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires.