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daaff01
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One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...
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loneliness
losing-yourself
getting-older
isolation
failure
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Thomas Pynchon |
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90e48b5
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The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything's on its head, it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2f9d8e8
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When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there's one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that'd take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down her..
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internet
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8d3f082
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Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3fcd017
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Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9acaa36
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Well my darlin, can't say it wasn't a blast, shoat but sweet as they say around the pigpen,
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3eea8b8
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The Telescope, the Flaxions, the inventions of Logarithms and the frenzy of multiplication, often for its own sake, that follow'd have for Emerson all been steps of an unarguable approach to God, a growing clarity,-- Gravity, the Pulse of time, the finite speed of Light present themselves to him as aspects of God's character. It's like becoming friendly with an erratic, powerful, potentially, dangerous member of the Aristocracy.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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85c1686
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Never mind. Just be advised, boys," she said, "you'll want to watch your step, 'cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism--lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it'll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol' pearl herself just goes a-rollin on."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4b3825d
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little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely offering her battlefield-ready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ebe8291
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Well, ring-tailed rutabagas.
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thomas pynchon |
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d16802e
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ay jalisco, no te rejas
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ab3c317
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I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute," Maskelyne assures him. "Reason, or any Vocation to it,-- the Pursuit of the Sciences,-- these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow, occasionally not even listen to."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1a380e5
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Nothing he had brought to it of his nearest comparison, Raby with its thatch'd and benevolent romance of serfdom, had at all prepar'd him for the iron Criminality of the Cape,-- the publick Executions and Whippings, the open'd flesh, the welling blood, the beefy contented faces of those whites.... Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor Peop..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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97b6c15
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Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c9eb426
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How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4ae4a2d
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His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith--even Cellini--shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d10d29b
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So," she said. All it was was no wheels on Profane, the boy a born pedestrian. Under his own power which was also power over her. Then what was she doing: declaring herself a dependent? As if here were the heart's authentic income-tax form, tortuous enough, mucked up with enough polysyllabic words to take her all of twenty-two years to figure out. At least that long: for surely it was complicated, being a duty you could rightfully avoid wit..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a9a0cb0
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Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ce120a4
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At no point in this did Frank think he was dreaming, probably because he seldom remembered dreams, or paid attention to them even if he did. And though this all had the alert immediacy of daytime Mexico in its ongoing dispute with its history, it would someday be relegated as well to the register of experiences he had been unable to find any use for.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c25db68
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Listen my darling, here's the situation - Wait ... , I'm talkin to a robot here, right? Again. So! uh-huh! how you're doing? how long you been a robot ... You wouldn't be Jewish, by any chance? Yeah, like when you were thirteen, did your parents give you a bot mitzvah?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6a530a8
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He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2ad1944
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so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c613414
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Uma geracao atras, o numero cada vez menor de nascimentos de criancas vivas entre os herero era um assunto de grande interesse para os medicos de toda a Africa meridional. Os brancos preocupavam-se, de tal modo como se o gado estivesse atacado de peste bovina. Uma coisa desagradavel, ver a populacao subjugada diminuindo daquele jeito anos apos ano. O que e uma colonia sem seus nativos de pele escura? Que graca tem, se todos eles vao morrer?..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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90a4b6d
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There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry...it suggests --average, you know--certainly you have two lobes, don't you, symmetrical about the rocket's intended azimuth... , too-smashing someone with a hoe or a club..." off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression , quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks...Slothrop's first impulse..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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13a86d2
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When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a5416ff
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Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.
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new-york-times
new-york-city
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e5ebafe
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Nobody in this band was a musician when they joined up, but everybody was in some kind of trouble. Play con entusiasmo, as loudly as you can, and trust the good will and bad ear of the gringo hellraiser.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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085e595
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There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, "haunted by a profound disgust for everything European," Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended u..
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triode
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6791cae
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One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story--the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.
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government
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6cc68d3
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Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fa254f6
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Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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69d8223
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Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity--
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Thomas Pynchon |
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11143c6
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He continues to believe, here on his French leave, and at his ease, that the interference is temporary and paper, a matter of messages routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when the War ends, so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b6e9cdf
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The band played up and down valleys still in those days unknown except to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses'd sprawl and the rates of human affliction in all categories zoom.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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307b5bf
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It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humors we do go in and out of. It may be only the room--a cube--having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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509e473
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It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d2bf531
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Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself--here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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88e254f
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Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bba0819
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But underneath all this reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt...Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide...Puzzling. Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might hav..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2cd934d
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Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't actually, rather have that reason...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b3accf8
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That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table." "Wa..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5aee1b1
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Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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30014d2
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They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regulated"--still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they're caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the emp..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a0e53a8
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It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than dark strength--it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts, smeared with years' pitiless use and..
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Thomas Pynchon |