Oil!
 Wednesday. 14.May.2008 | Comments? | Permalink 819

For a couple of months now I've been reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's a big book, and a tough one to read. Like the work of José Saramago, the style of Pynchon's writing turns reading it into work, made worthwhile by the golden nuggets scattered about (clever observations, plot twists, etc). But, writing density aside, Pynchon's work is quite different, full of postmodern style shifts and surreal episodes, some hardcore enough to make Pier Paolo Pasolini blush. Still, I'm writing all this because of the following passage from Gravity's Rainbow:

“[...] And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... "Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg we're coming into now, you know the old refrain, 'I lost my heart in Heidelberg',well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don't get me wrong, it's really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful - when they're not dueling. [...]”
'Nuff said. ···