Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page A

rise again all His children to save,
    I must lie, as His Word in the Scriptures hath taught me.
    Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
    And in midst of prosperity, know thou may’st die.
    While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,
    And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.
     
    To the current Slothrop’s grandfather Frederick (d. 1933), who in typical sarcasm
     and guile bagged his epitaph from Emily Dickinson, without a credit line:
     
    Because I could not stop for Death
    He kindly stopped for me
     
    Each one in turn paying his debt to nature due and leaving the excess to the next
     link in the name’s chain. They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers
     of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers
     of marble. Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust
     that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere
     across the Republic. Always elsewhere. The money seeping its way out through stock
     portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went
     into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into
     paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money,
     and the Word. They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social
     Register or the Somerset Club—they carried on their enterprise in silence, assimilated
     in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to
     churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the
     American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate.
    But they did not prosper . . . about all they did was persist—though it all began
     to go sour for them around the time Emily Dickinson, never far away, was writing
     
    Ruin is formal, devil’s work,
    Consecutive and slow—
    Fail in an instant no man did,
    Slipping is crash’s law,
     
    still they would keep on. The tradition, for others, was clear, everyone knew—mine
     it out, work it, take all you can till it’s gone then move on west, there’s plenty
     more. But out of some reasoned inertia the Slothrops stayed east in Berkshire, perverse—close
     to the flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides they’d left like signed confessions
     across all that thatchy-brown, moldering witch-country. The profits slackening, the
     family ever multiplying. Interest from various numbered trusts was still turned, by
     family banks down in Boston every second or third generation, back into yet another
     trust, in long rallentando, in infinite series just perceptibly, term by term, dying . . .
     but never quite to the zero. . . .
    The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what’d been under way. Slothrop grew
     up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under, hedges around the estates of
     the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness
     or straw death, all the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys
     gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for foxtrots in the distances,
     limousines and lamps, but only the accustomed crickets again, apples again, early
     frosts to send the hummingbirds away, east wind, October rain: only winter certainties.
    In 1931, the year of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, young Tyrone was visiting his
     aunt and uncle in Lenox. It was in April, but for a second or two as he was coming
     awake in the strange room and the racket of big and little cousins’ feet down the
     stairs, he thought of winter, because so often he’d been wakened like this, at this
     hour of sleep, by Pop, or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay
     of dream into the cold to watch the Northern Lights.
    They scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just