Saturday, November 27, 2010

Gravity's Rainbow Identity

"Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thing, to scatter. "Personal density...is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.../..."Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is a familiar "[delta]T" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment" (509)

"Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himsel, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred. / Pas Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host." (624)

"he becomes a cross himself, a crossroad, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon." (625)

"He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying ot hold him together, even as a concept—"It's just got too remote" 's what they usually say)...But somebody's got to hold on, it can't happen to all of us—no, that'd be too much" (740-1)

"The lat image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure...And in the darkening and awful expanse of the screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know—" (760)

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