SOURCE: Black, Joel D. “Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.” Boundary 2 8, no. 2 (winter 1980): 229-54.

In the following essay, Black discusses the ways in which Gravity's Rainbow revivifies the Romantic conception of the relationship between the physical force of gravity and the ethical problems of humanity's Fall and sinful nature.

How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with augur and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of...