#192

“We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was only open aplin and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide to that openness: it is terror to us” (id, 268).

#191

“What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them – it says exactly nothing. The moment of of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator” (id, 167).

#190

“The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fürher – it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness – not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life” (id, 133).

#189

“It was widely believed in those days that behind the War – all the death, savagery, and destruction – lay the Fürher-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources” (Pynchon, 2006: 82).

PYNCHON, Thomas (2006). Gravity's Rainbow. London: Penguin.

#188

“It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom” (id, 277).

#187

“Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. (...) In our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room” (id, 223-224).

#186

“Objective evidence for subjective preferences does not make the value judgement itself objective, but merely objectifies the preferences. This process brings to light those predilections that govern us. These can be then seen as an expression of personal norms (...) and in being exposed they open up an intersubjective means of access to our value judgements” (Iser, 1980: 25).

ISER, Wolfgang (1980). The Act Of Reading. A Theory Of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, Londres: The Johns Hopkins University Press.