History, the proverb says

History, the proverb says is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn’t fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 215, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

Until last year

Until last year along came theFashoda crisis and quite early one morning Covess was discovered in spats and a pith helmet, working his way around Piccadilly trying to recruit volunteers to invade France. Therehad been some idea of commandeering a Cunard liner. By the time they caught him he’d sworn in several coster-mongers, two streetwalkers and a music-hall comedian. Stencil remembered painfully that they all had been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers in various key and tempi.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 174, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

If he’d been the type

If he’d been the type who evolves theories of political history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

While at Anthroresearch

While at Anthroresearch Profane listened with half an ear to the coffee percolating; and carried on another imaginary conversation with SHROUD. By now that had become a tradition.

Remember, Profane, how it is on Route 14, souths, outside Elmira, New York? You walk on an overpass and look west and see the sun setting on a junkpile. Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers. A graveyard for cars. If I could die, that’s what my graveyard would look like.

“I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like a human being. You ought to be junked. Not burned or cremated.”

Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz? Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemihl: It’s already started.

“Hitler did that. He was crazy.”

Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it’s started?

“What, for Christ sake?”

- Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V, p. 275 (Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)