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In The Eighteenth Century It Was Often Convenient To Regard Man As A Clockwork Automaton. In The Nineteenth Century, With Newtonian Physics Pretty Well Assimilated And A Lot Of Work In Thermodynamics Going On, Man Was Looked On As A Heat Engine, About 40 Per Cent Efficient. Now In The Twentieth Century, With Nuclear And Subatomic Physics A Going Thing, Man Had Become Something Which Absorbs X-rays, Gamma Rays And Neutrons.

-Thomas Pynchon

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In The Eighteenth Century

Thomas Pynchon

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In The Eighteenth Century It Was Often Convenient To Regard Man As A Clockwork Automaton. In The Nineteenth Century, With Newtonian Physics Pretty Well Assimilated And A Lot Of Work In Thermodynamics Going On, Man Was Looked On As A Heat Engine, About 40 Per Cent Efficient. Now In The Twentieth Century, With Nuclear And Subatomic Physics A Going Thing, Man Had Become Something Which Absorbs X-rays, Gamma Rays And Neutrons.

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There Was No Difference Between The Behavior Of A God And The Operations Of Pure Chance.

A Weapon Based On Time . . ." Mused Viktor Mulciber. "well, Why Not? The One Force No One Knows How To Defeat, Resist, Or Reverse. It Kills All Forms Of Life Sooner Or Later. With A Time-weapon You Could Become The Most Feared Person In History." "i'd Rather Be Loved," Said Root. Mulciber Shrugged. "you're Young.

A Woman Is Only Half Of Something There Are Usually Two Sides To.

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You Know What A Miracle Is. Not What Bakunin Said. But Another World’s Intrusion Into This One. Most Of The Time We Coexist Peacefully, But When We Do Touch There’s Cataclysm.

Hey, Over Here! Have Your Picture Taken With A Reclusive Author! Today Only, We'll Throw In A Free Autograph! But Wait, There's More!

But With A Sigh He Had Released Her Hand, While She Was So Lost In The Fantasy That She Hadn't Felt It Go Away, As If He'd Known The Best Moment To Let Go.

It All Comes Down, As It Must, To The Desires Of Individual Men. Oh, And Women Too Of Course, Bless Their Empty Little Heads.

But A Few Choosing To Venture Deeper Into The Painful Corridors Of Their Affliction, Found After A While That They Could Now Grind And Polish Ever More Exotic Surfaces, Hyperboloidial And Even Stranger, Eventually Including What We Must Term ‘imaginary’ Shapes (which Some Preferred To Term Invisible).

Who Claims Truth, Truth Abandons. History Is Hir'd, Or Coerc'd, Only In Interests That Must Ever Prove Base. She Is Too Innocent, To Be Left Within The Reach Of Anyone In Power,- Who Need But Touch Her, And All Her Credit Is In The Instant Vanish'd, As If It Had Never Been. She Needs Rather To Be Tended Lovingly And Honorably By Fabulists And Counterfeiters, Ballad-mongers And Cranks Of Ev'ry Radius, Masters Of Disguise To Provide Her The Costume, Toilette, And Bearing, And Speech Nimble Enough To Keep Her Beyond The Desires, Or Even The Curiosity, Of Government.

The Lord's Angel, Gebrail, Dictated The Koran To Mohammed The Lord's Prophet. What A Joke If All That Holy Book Were Only Twenty-three Years Of Listening To The Desert. A Desert Which Has No Voice.

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If They Can Get You Asking The Wrong Questions, They Don't Have To Worry About Answers.

Asking Questions

Ills Are Many, Blessings Few, But Dreams Tonight Will Shelter You.

But As With Maxwell's Demon, So Now. Either She Could Not Communicate, Or He Did Not Exist.

There Is A Theory Going Around That The U.s.a. Was And Still Is A Gigantic Masonic Plot Under The Ultimate Control Of The Group Known As The Illuminati. It Is Difficult To Look For Long At The Strange Single Eye Crowning The Pyramid Which Is Found On Every Dollar Bill And Not Begin To Believe The Story, A Little. Too Many Anarchists In 19th-century Europe—bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons For It To Be Pure Chance. Lovers Of Global Conspiracy, Not All Of Them Catholic, Can Count On The Masons For A Few Good Shivers And Voids When All Else Fails.

It Takes, Unhappily, No More Than A Desk And Writing Supplies To Turn Any Room Into A Confessional.

What Are The Stars But Points In The Body Of God Where We Insert The Healing Needles Of Our Terror And Longing?

Liebig Himself Seems To Have Occupied The Role Of A Gate, Or Sorting-demon, Such As His Younger Contemporary Clerk Maxwell Once Proposed, Helping To Concentrate Energy Into One Favored Room Of The Creation At The Expense Of Everything Else.

Right And Left; The Hothouse And The Street. The Right Can Only Live And Work Hermetically, In The Hothouse Of The Past, While Outside The Left Prosecute Their Affairs In The Streets Manipulated By Mob Violence. And Cannot Live But In The Dreamscape Of The Future.

She Touched The Edge Of Its Voluptuous Field, Knowing It Would Be Lovely Beyond Dreams Simply To Submit To It; That Not Gravity's Pull, Laws Of Ballistics, Feral Ravening, Promised More Delight. She Tested It, Shivering: I Am Meant To Remember. Each Clue That Comes Is Supposed To Have Its Own Clarity, Its Fine Chances For Permanence. But Then She Wondered If The Gemlike "clues" Were Only Some Kind Of Compensation. To Make Up For Her Having Lost The Direct, Epileptic Word, The Cry That Might Abolish The Night.

Danger's Over, Banana Breakfast Is Saved.

My Mother Is The War,' Declares Roger Mexico, Leaning Over To Open The Door.

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Changing Your Life

All Investigations Of Time, However Sophisticated Or Abstract, Have At Their True Base The Human Fear Of Mortality.

For Every Kind Of Vampire, There Is A Kind Of Cross

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I Came," She Said, "hoping You Could Talk Me Out Of A Fantasy." Cherish It!" Cried Hilarious, Fiercely. "what Else Do Any Of You Have? Hold It Tightly By It's Little Tentacle, Don't Let The Freudians Coax It Away Or The Pharmacists Poison It Out Of You. Whatever It Is, Hold It Dear, For When You Lose It You Go Over By That Much To The Others. You Begin To Cease To Be.

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What Sort Of An Age Is This Where A Man Becomes One's Enemy Only When His Back Is Turned?

There Is Nothing So Loathsome As A Sentimental Surrealist.

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Despair Came Over Her, As It Will When Nobody Around Has Any Sexual Relevance To You.

The Saint Whose Water Can Light Lamps, The Clairvoyant Whose Lapse In Recall Is The Breath Of God, The True Paranoid For Whom All Is Organized In Spheres Joyful Or Threatening About The Central Pulse Of Himself, The Dreamer Whose Puns Probe Ancient Fetid Shafts And Tunnels Of Truth All Act In The Same Special Relevance To The Word, Or Whatever It Is The Word Is There, Buffering, To Protect Us From. The Act Of Metaphor Than Was A Thrust At Truth And A Lie, Depending Where You Were: Inside, Safe Or Outside, Lost.

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This Is America, You Live In It, You Let It Happen. Let It Unfurl.

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[oedipa Maas] Awoke At Last To Find Herself Getting Laid.

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A Screaming Comes Across The Sky.

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Murphy's Law, That Brash Proletarian Restatement Of Godel's Theorem.

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They Plot, They Plot, Sleeping Or Afoot They Never Let Up.

Someday It'll All Be Done By Machine. Information Machines.

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To Have Humanism We Must First Be Convinced Of Our Humanity. As We Move Further Into Decadence This Becomes More Difficult.

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If The World Offered Nothing, Nowhere To Support Or Make Bearable Whatever Her Private Grief Was, Then It Is That World, And Not She, That Is At Fault.

Shall I Project A World?

Perhaps Its Familiarity Rendered It Temporarily Invisible To You.

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If America Was A Person, And It Sat Down, Lancaster Town Would Be Plunged Into A Darkness Unbreathable.

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Behind The Hieroglyphic Streets There Would Either Be A Transcendent Meaning, Or Only The Earth.

Teamwork," Koteks Snarled, "is One Word For It, Yeah. What It Really Is Is A Way To Avoid Responsibility. It's A Symptom Of The Gutlessness Of The Whole Society.

What, I Should Only Trust Good People? Man, Good People Get Bought And Sold Every Day. Might As Well Trust Somebody Evil Once In A While, It Makes No More Or Less Sense.

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