Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Jan Klimkowski]

"It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world."

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

This is wisdom, timeless and inescapable.

It is.

But indulge me, Pynchon's prose is resonant, and a longer excerpt sprinkles some subtly different magick dust.

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.

Mass death.

Grieving parents.

Griefstricken friends.

Mass death. Bloody slaughter.

Trauma used to switch the points.... to send the train hurtling along the chosen tracks...