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2d99911
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Yet after night fall most any layover here, it seemed that they ended up cruising the bleak arterials of dismal L.A. backwaters, seeking out of some helpless fatality the company of lowlifes of opportunity.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8607c40
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Philosophick Work, to proceed at all smartly, wouldn't you agree, requires a controll'd working-space.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c28681a
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He gazed at Reef in almost unconcealed envy, failing completely to recognize the darker thing, the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself. Webb
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4cedec0
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One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The hand..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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755a016
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Of all her putative fathers -- Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Night, on the other -- Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdic..
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tragedy
loss-of-innocence
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Thomas Pynchon |
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85d22dc
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Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message....
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Thomas Pynchon |
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eb35066
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Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?' 'Why am I surrounded,' his usual understanding self today, 'by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant.
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war
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f4b7579
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Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,-- these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ae20326
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Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-Time, announcing that all events would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d39c950
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It is an ajtys--a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there's-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance--kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5b13af9
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She has assisted at more than one Birth, has endur'd a hard-drinking and quarrelsome troop of Men-Folk,-- who is this unfamily'd man in a Frock to call her child?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bea8fed
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Earth, withal, is a Body, like our own, with its network of Points, dispos'd along its Meridians,-- much as our medicine in China has identified, upon the Human body, a like set of Lines invisible, upon which, bead wise, are strung Points, where the Flow of may be beneficially strengthen'd by insertions of Gold Needles.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8603b86
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Es el calido, romantico verano de 1945 y, con rendicion o sin ella, persiste el culto de la muerte: acaba de perpetrarse lo que la Abuelita llamaba <>, la tecnica preferida en nuestros dias para resolver disputas interpersonales, a falta de pasion por cualquier otro aspecto de la vida.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5e84045
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They but appear a solemn People,-- worshipping Laughter, rather, as a serious, indeed holy, Force in Nature, never to be invok'd idly.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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16592a7
|
Y que quieres?, ?es que solo tengo que fiarme de las buenas personas?, tio, a las buenas personas las compran y las venden todos los dias. Tanto da que me fie de algun autentico cabron de vez en cuando, al final viene a ser lo mismo. Quiero decir que no apostaria por ninguno de los dos.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e6c0913
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It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never been my own,-- rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as 'twere a Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten'd on. . . .
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Thomas Pynchon |
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16e488c
|
What'll happen is," Alex McClean advises, "is you'll get hammer'd paying double taxes, visits all the time from Sheriffs of both provinces looking for their quitrents, tax collectors from Philadelphia and Annapolis, and sooner or later you'll have to decide just to get it up on some Logs, and roll it, one way or the other. Depends how your Property runs, I'd guess." ". . . as North is pretty much up-hill," Mr. Price is reckoning," 'twould c..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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70e4718
|
here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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817bf02
|
Dixon, our, um, Lives? are in Danger?" "Hardly enough to interrupt a perfectly good--" Here he is silenc'd by an immense Thunder-Bolt from directly overhead, as their frail Prism is bleach'd in unholy Light. "-- Saturday Night for, is it I ask you . . . ?" his Head emerging at last from beneath a Blanket, "Mason? Say, Mason,-- are thee . . . ?" Mason, now outside, pushes aside the Tent-flap with his head, but does not enter. "Dixon. I will ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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418b7d2
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A tragic sigh. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" "I thought it was cigarettes." "You dream." He brings out a list of Zurich cafes and gathering spots. Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Lichtspiel, and Straggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced. "Footwork," folding the list in ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fc64601
|
Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon's turn to begin shaking his head. "Can't understand how anyone abides that stuff." "How so?" Mason unable not to react. "Well, it's disgusting, isn't it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?" "Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,-- what all tasteful London drinks,-- that," pollicating the Coffee-Pot, "is what's disgusting." "Au contra..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b54d5db
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Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch'd with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev'ry place they ran it, ev'ry House pass'd by, Road cross'd, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev'ry-where, and the Dragon nearly visible. "So,-- so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate 'Morphosis,-- and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?" "Not the worst I've h..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d79b9df
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Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0cc5118
|
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. --WERNHER VON BRAUN
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Thomas Pynchon |
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292c841
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He really ought to remember. . . . The airburst, if it happens, will be in visual range. Abstractions, math, models are fine, but when you're down to it and everybody's hollering for a fix, this is what you do: you go and sit exactly on the target with indifferent shallow trenches for shelter, and you watch it in the silent fire-bloom of its last few seconds, and see what you will see. Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of co..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bc2a3e5
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Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel's Alice, same forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into the house and right behind them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of the garden but--why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes o..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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eb99d7e
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His workplace has become a rat's nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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32ad729
|
The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope." "The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick." "We'll go there. We'll live there." "We'll fish there. And you too."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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00ad39d
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They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4f1a3b6
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The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7a93528
|
I dreamt of a City to the West of here," Dixon tries to recall, scrying in his Coffee-Mug, the wind blowing Wood-smoke in his eyes, "at some great Confluence of Rivers, or upon a Harbor in some inland Sea,-- a large City,-- busy, prospering, sacred." "A Sylvan Philadelphia. . . ." "Well . . . well yes, now tha put it thah' way,-- " "I hope you are prepar'd for the possibility, that waking Philadelphia is as sacred as anything over here will..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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08b35c9
|
THE ENGLISHMAN'S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT) (Bloat): The Englishman's very shy, He's none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver, A-mericans lead the pack-- (Tantivy): --You see, your Englishman tends to lack That recklessness transatlantic, That women find so romantic Though frankly I can't see why . . . (Bloat): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits, (Tantivy): Though he's secretly ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2433e81
|
Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b4ff350
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Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea is it you have plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenalin, but caught really, buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, fin..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b54b716
|
Mason bleakly exhales. "No Hell, then?" "Not inside the Earth, anyway." "Nor any . . . Single Administrator of Evil." "They did introduce me to some Functionary,-- no telling,-- We chatted, others came in. They ask'd if I'd take off as much of my Clothing as I'd feel comfortable with,-- I stepp'd out of my Shoes, left my Hat on . . . ? They walk'd 'round me in Circles, now and then poking at me . . . ? Nothing too intrusive." "Nothing you r..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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82c3bda
|
Tis fascinating, this belief among you Men of Science," remarks Dr. J., "that Time is ever more simply transcended, the further one is willing to journey away from London, to observe it." "Why, Mason here's done the very thing," cries Boswell. "In America. Ask him." Mason glowers, shaking his head. "I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended,-- but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5c272e5
|
I had my Boswell, once," Mason tells Boswell, "Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam'd Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev'rything down, just like you, Sir. Have you," twirling his Hand in Ellipses,-- "you know, ever . . . had one yourself? If I'm not prying." "Had one what?" "Hum . . . a Boswell, Sir,-- I mean, of your own. Well you couldn't very well call him that, being one yourself,-- say, a sort of Shadow ever in the Room who has hau..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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31ae112
|
Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was one her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1cfe5f2
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Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef wasn't it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow- easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7b453af
|
The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people's history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.
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war
history
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8483af7
|
She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo--any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3e4164e
|
It is part," Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens to drown him, "part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes- it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2ee222c
|
So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and double for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets ..
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true
postmodernism
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Thomas Pynchon |
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13c8860
|
So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets..
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true
postmodernism
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Thomas Pynchon |