.....Where's the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels and that National Geographic? Parabolas weren't all that New German Architecture went in for--there were the spaces--the necropolism of blank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human harvests rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or health, then there may have been, even here, some continuity of sacrament, through the terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometrical capital before the destruction--the fallow and long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete . . . except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms open to the sky, wall-less roomes pitched out over the sea of ruins in prows, in crow's-nests. . . . Old men with their tins searching the ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. Advertisements for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, once classified, folded bürgerlich inside newspapers to be read at one's ease in the lacquered and graceful parlors are now stuck with Hitler-head stamps of blue, orange, and yellow, out in the wind, when the wind comes, stuck to trees, door-frames, planking, pieces of wall--white and fading scraps, writing spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unsee, thousands unread or blown away. At the Winterhilfe one-course Sundays you sat outside at long tables under the swastika-draped winter trees, but outside has been brought inside and that kind of Sunday lasts all week long. Winter is coming again. All Berline spends the daylight trying to make believe it isn't. Scarred trees are back in leaf, baby birds hatched and learning to fly, but winter's here behind the look of summer--Earth has turned over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed. . . . [Gravity's Rainbow, V372-373]