“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”

— Thomas Pynchon , book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 6
Context: Who knew? Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. <!-- p. 150

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Thomas Pynchon 134

American novelist 1937

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“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”

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Thomas Pynchon 134

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