On mice and men

I have very little to say this week because I've been caught entirely by this small moment in "Gravity's Rainbow," where Webley Silvernail speaks so tenderly to the caged mice that his unit experiments on.

He tells them:

"I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive..."

I will submit that this can be a frustrating novel in deep need of an editor, but come on, where else can you encounter such delicate beauty like this?