And lo and behold, it turns out you’re not alone. Well, guess what? Jackson, you’re one of the ones who did get struck by lightning, and now you feel as if something has been unveiled to you something essential, fundamental, about the world, like you finally understand its meaning-or perhaps finally get the joke-and now, you cannot meaningfully connect to anyone whose experience isn’t commensurate with yours. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning.” “Most people’s lives,” Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow, “have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. A distance emerges between you and your loved ones, an irritating cavity that becomes an irreconcilable chasm. Like, a make-you-see-everything-differently kind of change. And you …experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life-do you know what the 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? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all in the gnat’s-ass…of the ∆t across the point. “This is only one of many American Mysteries,” Säure sighs, “I wish somebody could clear up for me. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.” “Why do you speak of certain reversals-machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon