March 2023

What a damn fool thing. He hangs at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can’t manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A detente. Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death… Slothrop’s Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

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