Радуга тяготения

Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively.

And he also knew at first hand what happens to dreams with no money to support them.

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences. ..

Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be coming at you off-balance, remember.

But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands.

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image.

Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.

"Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold."
You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me. ...

Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?

So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites . . . but coming back is something he's already forgotten about.