Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963)
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow
men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried
voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry
grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form,
shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have
crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all --
not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not
appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree
swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more
solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let
me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed
staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final
meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is
cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The
supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
It is like
this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we
are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken
stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this
valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost
kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid
speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes
reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight
kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly
pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five
o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the
motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine
is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the
emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life
is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the
existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is the
Life is
For Thine
is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
