Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

The basic problem has always been getting other people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life? That's where religion had the edge. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. But look: if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die?

Only one part left. And I want to be done with it asap

Met Bianca and not gonna lie, want to punch this book. I hope hope hope Pynchon has a great point to make with all this. 🤞

So, as usual, Pökler chose silence. Had he chosen something else, back while there was time, they all might have saved themselves. Even left the country. Now, too late, when at last he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on. Well, to be honest, he didn't spend much time brooding about past neutralities. He wasn't that sure he's outgrown them, anyway.

“They’re using you to kill people,� Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only job, and you’re helping them.�
“We’ll all use it, someday,� Pökler responds, “to leave the earth. To transcend. Someday,"honestly trying,"they won't have to kill. Borders won't mean anything.We'll have all outer space..."
"Oh you're blind",spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day,that and "Kadavergehorsamkeit"

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....

he and a dozen colleagues hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War's over there
'You say Germany? You gone goofy? It's a mess there, Jackson!"
"Not nearly the mess we left back home," the sad Argentine replies.

This book is mercurial. Is it random? I can’t tell at this point. There might be a big grand plan. But even if there isn’t, I strangely don’t mind it at all. What I know is that my brain currently finds it exciting

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours� and which are “mine.� It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible.