GR Awesomeness
So I was continuing my re-read of Gravity's Rainbow during my flight home from DC yesterday, and I came across an awesome passage I have to share here. I give you Thomas Pynchon, on colonialism:
"Wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe there's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . ." -GR, Thomas Pynchon, p 322
I was also just at a very heavy part of the novel. Basically, there's a chapter that's about the Herero genocide in Namibia, and what the exiled Herero living in Germany felt about it. It's incredibly poetic and moving. The next chapter is a pie fight between two guys in a balloon and a some crazy racists in a fighter plane singing limericks about having sex with the V2 rocket. Then the next chapter is about Russians stationed in 1930s Kyrgyzstan attempting to introduce an alphabet into a culture that has never had one, and the bureaucratic insanity involved. I had almost forgotten how deftly Pynchon weaves the serious and the zany together.
How is this not the best book ever?
"Wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe there's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . ." -GR, Thomas Pynchon, p 322
I was also just at a very heavy part of the novel. Basically, there's a chapter that's about the Herero genocide in Namibia, and what the exiled Herero living in Germany felt about it. It's incredibly poetic and moving. The next chapter is a pie fight between two guys in a balloon and a some crazy racists in a fighter plane singing limericks about having sex with the V2 rocket. Then the next chapter is about Russians stationed in 1930s Kyrgyzstan attempting to introduce an alphabet into a culture that has never had one, and the bureaucratic insanity involved. I had almost forgotten how deftly Pynchon weaves the serious and the zany together.
How is this not the best book ever?