IJ study archive

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (in Girl With Curious Hair)

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TL;DR

Wallace's 1989 novella — the closing, double-length story of Girl With Curious Hair — treated standalone because it is the E Unibus Pluram program's fiction twin and the highest-signal single item in the pre-1996 corpus: the EUP-connection axis of the archive cites it constantly, and burying it as a section of the collection note would undersell it. It stages an adman's dream of a final commercial after which "no one will ever leave" (the Entertainment prototype arrived at from the advertising side), attacks metafiction from inside and proposes the story-as-Funhouse-that-wounds-a-lover aesthetic IJ later executes at novel scale, and gives Mark Nechtr the sealed-off access to his own emotions that prefigures Hal's condition. Nine audited CONNECTION blocks (three at prefiguration), every quote byte-verified against the electronic text; zero THEORY blocks — the novella advances no claim about an IJ crux. Collection context: girl-with-curious-hair.

Key claims

  • The Entertainment prototype, from the advertising side. J.D. Steelritter's planned Reunion commercial is an entertainment so total it terminally consumes its whole audience at once — "No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion"; "Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along" (:p475–:p476). The samizdat's exact logic, stated as an adman's manifesto seven years before IJ; held at prefiguration (comic-apocalyptic, never dramatized as a working lethal artifact).
  • The programmatic seed of IJ's anti-Entertainment aesthetic. The novella diagnoses metafiction as "a lonely solipsist's self-love" (:p662) and proposes, through Mark Nechtr, a fiction that treats the reader like a lover it means to wound — "Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him" (:p659); "write something that stabs you in the heart" (:p663). This is DFW's method (carried as CONNECTION, not THEORY): the aesthetic IJ enacts at novel scale against the pacifying Entertainment inside it.
  • Mark Nechtr prefigures Hal's condition. Clinically flagged denied access to his own emotions — "When he has emotions, it's like he's denied access to them… he feels disembodied, other" (:p422); "either he doesn't feel anything, or he doesn't feel anything" (:p423) — the felt-interior / sealed-exterior double-bind that defines Hal, with the direction shared but not identical (archery soothes Mark; Hal's case is terminal).
  • Solipsism is the explicit spine, staged at both poles: the private solipsist (Mark, "the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world," :p426) and the adman who monetizes the condition ("Solipsism binds us together… It's Steelritter's meat," :p472).
  • TV-as-vapid-comfort stated in-world: rerun television as "a womb with a view" (:p536), vapidity defended as entertainment's virtue — the EUP thesis IJ literalizes, held at shared-preoccupation.
  • Fear manufactured into desire, children a guarded special market ("We produce what makes you want to need to consume," :p715; "Is there a different list for kids?" / "Not at liberty," :p290–:p291) — and the text itself rebuts the manufacture doctrine through Magda ("Fear and desire are already married. Freely," :p799; cite-as-written, audit-added).
  • The closing "You are loved" — a second-person seduction ("Lie back. Relax… It's a love song," :p909–:p911) that rhymes with the maternal/apology address the Entertainment is theorized to weaponize; held at shared-preoccupation because the IJ-content reading is itself a theory, not settled text.
  • The art-licensed-into-commerce knot (audit-added): Ambrose's "For Whom" story licensed by Steelritter as the Funhouse franchise "blueprint" (:p652) — the artwork's afterlife as product past authorial intent, rhyming with JOI's cartridge becoming the contended samizdat commodity.
  • The annular/spin imagination recurs (spin-watching, :p44; the towed wheel spinning "against the spin, inside," :p908), folding Lyndon's reclaiming-curve bridge — ruled an intra-GWCH bridge, not an IJ echo; the IJ-relevant residue is the annular figure only.
  • Zero THEORY blocks — the honest call; the novella advances no interpretive claim about an IJ crux.

Theories & evidence

None — the novella genuinely advances no theory about IJ. Its densest and most tempting material — the anti-Entertainment aesthetic manifesto — is DFW's method, the seed of the work IJ becomes, not an argument that adjudicates an IJ crux; the IJ-bearing signal is carried in the nine CONNECTION blocks below, per the archive's CONNECTION-block conventions.

The novella

Locators are paragraph indices, [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:pN], tagged [e-text]; the electronic text is canonical for this book (no print pagination on disk).

Capsule (factual)

A long metafictional novella that both tells a story and narrates, continuously and self-interruptingly, the story of its own telling. The frame plot: three young people fly and then drive across the Midwest toward Collision, Illinois, for a mass "Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Appeared in a McDonald's Commercial," staged by adman J.D. Steelritter as the site of the biggest commercial ever shot and of the grand opening of the first Funhouse discotheque franchise. The three: Mark Nechtr, a healthy, loved, blocked graduate-writing student and competitive archer, heir to a detergent fortune; his estranged wife Drew-Lynn ("D.L.") Eberhardt, a self-declared postmodernist who has faked a pregnancy to bind him; and Tom Sternberg, a claustrophobic aspiring commercial actor from Boston with one eye turned backward in his head, who dreads being embodied. All three studied or orbit the writing program of the famous metafictionist Dr. C—— Ambrose (author of "Lost in the Funhouse"), whose story Steelritter has licensed as the blueprint for the Funhouse franchise. The group misses its shuttle, fails to rent a car, and is driven by J.D. and his stoned clown son DeHaven (the current Ronald McDonald) in DeHaven's malevolent homemade car, along with Magda Ambrose-Gatz, an aging, orange-faced flight attendant who was the first McDonald's-commercial housewife and Ambrose's ex-wife. The car breaks down short of Collision in a storm; the novella breaks off before the Reunion, with the party being towed by a farmer's horse and the narrator addressing the reader directly.

Interleaved with the frame are: Ambrose's classroom pronouncements on fiction (transcribed from Mark's notes); the origin-myth of Collision (a Depression-era car collision that becomes a market, a town, and the Steelritter rose farm and Kroc/McDonald's empire); J.D.'s interior monologues on advertising, desire, fear, and his planned apocalypse of consumption; Hogan's roadside "FEAR" market-research scheme; Mark's "fried roses" (an Ambrose-supplied intoxicant that "marries" fear and desire); Magda's oracular reading of each character's future; and, at length, the full text of the story-that-isn't-Mark's-own — "Dave," a competitive archer imprisoned for the arrow-death of his lover "L——," interrogated by a Warden who is the TV icon Jack Lord, and pressured to "rat" on an escaped cellmate named Mark. The novella ends on the reader, second person: "For whom? / You are loved."

Register: maximalist metafiction — recursive, self-interrupting, sectioned by mock-headings (in block capitals), heavily ironic, Latinate and slangy by turns, digressive by design; a running argument with Barth-style postmodernism conducted as a Barth-style postmodern text. Third person over the three kids and J.D., with an intrusive first-person "I"/"we" narrator (a member of Ambrose's workshop) who addresses the reader and confesses the artifice throughout.

Key figures: Mark Nechtr, D.L. Eberhardt, Tom Sternberg, J.D. Steelritter, DeHaven Steelritter (Ronald), Magda Ambrose-Gatz, Dr. C—— Ambrose (offstage), Hogan (fear-researcher), Jack Lord (icon, and Warden in the inner story); the intrusive workshop-narrator.

CONNECTION: The final commercial after which no one leaves — an entertainment/ad that consumes its whole audience at once (the Entertainment prototype)

  • Crux: eup-connection (also entertainment-lethality)
  • Early text: quote J.D.'s foreseen Reunion is an entertainment so total it ends its audience: "No one will ever leave the rose farm's Reunion. The revelation of What They Want will be on them; and, in that revelation of Desire, they will Possess. They will all Pay The Price—without persuasion. It's J.D.'s swan song... Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life. The last commercial." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p476]; the crowd "succumbing, as one" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p475]. [e-text]
  • IJ echo: JOI's Entertainment / "the samizdat" as the limit-case of exactly this — a filmed entertainment so complete that every viewer who begins it cannot stop and is consumed by it. The cartridge's introduction and its role in the ONAN/AFR plot (scene 029, pp. 87–92); the Medical Attaché who begins watching and watches himself into catatonia (scene 007, pp. 33–37; scene 025, pp. 78–79; scene 028, p. 87); Marathe & Steeply on "losing people to the Entertainment" (scene 101, pp. 507–508).
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: The headline early-work connection. J.D.'s literalized fantasy — an entertainment/advertisement whose perfect success is the total, terminal consumption of its audience, after which nothing more is needed or possible — is the Entertainment's exact logic, arrived at from the advertising side rather than the auteur-film side. Held at prefiguration (not "the developed device") because Westward's version is comic-apocalyptic and never dramatized as a working lethal artifact; but it states the thesis the samizdat embodies almost as a manifesto.

CONNECTION: "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" — metafiction critiqued from inside, and the story-as-Funhouse-that-wounds-a-lover (the anti-Entertainment aesthetic IJ enacts)

  • Crux: eup-connection (also entertainment-purpose)
  • Early text: quote epigraph: "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p4]; Mark's counter-program: "The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p659]; and the confessed desire: "Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p663].
  • IJ echo: IJ's own status as an anti-Entertainment — a difficult, wounding, un-lulling work set against the seductive-passive entertainment it depicts; DFW's program of fiction that reaches and hurts the reader awake rather than pacifying (the Entertainment's making as a doomed attempt to reach someone, and the anti-Entertainment / book-as-samizdat family of readings — both developed further in the archive's theories about the Entertainment's purpose). No single scene keys this; the nearest anchors are JOI's motive for making the cartridge (JOI life/death, scene 020, pp. 63–65) and Molly Notkin's account of the Entertainment's design (scene 159, pp. 787–795).
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: This is the programmatic seed of IJ: Westward diagnoses metafiction as "a lonely solipsist's self-love" that "cannot betray... can only reveal" [:p662], and proposes instead a fiction that treats the reader like a lover it means to wound — the aesthetic IJ later executes at novel scale (the whole book positioned against the pacifying Entertainment inside it). Recorded as a connection, not a theory, because it is DFW's method, not an interpretive claim about an IJ plot crux. IJ locator deliberately diffuse (a whole-book aesthetic stance, per the plan's "say so rather than invent" rule).

CONNECTION: A protagonist who cannot access his own emotions — the interior/exterior split that prefigures Hal's condition

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Early text: quote "It's not that Mark's emotions are disordered or troubled, but that he is troubled in relation to them... When he has emotions, it's like he's denied access to them. He doesn't ever feel in possession of his emotions. When he has them, they feel far from him; he feels disembodied, other. Except when he shoots, he very rarely feels anything at all." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p422]; when shooting "he stands somewhere outside himself, eyewitness to his own joy" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p422]; the flat summary: "either he doesn't feel anything, or he doesn't feel anything." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p423].
  • IJ echo: Hal's condition — a rich felt interior sealed off from any external expression or from Hal's own possession of it; the anhedonia/affect cluster built around Kate Gompert and refracted through Hal (scene 135, pp. 692–698); Hal, apparently cheery/cool while inwardly disintegrating, unable to externalize what is inside him (professional-conversationalist opener, scene 005, pp. 27–31; Hal watching JOI's films, scene 132, pp. 686–689; scene 172, pp. 906–911).
  • Weight: prefiguration
  • Notes: Unusually precise. Mark is "in and out of places" for "professionally diagnosed emotional problems," appears "cool, neutrally cheery," yet is estranged from feelings that "feel far from him" — the exact double-bind (felt interior / blank or false exterior; watching oneself) that defines Hal. The direction is shared but not identical (Mark's estrangement is soothed by archery, Hal's terminal), so recorded as prefiguration of the condition, not a one-to-one map of Hal's plot. Overlaps the anhedonia new-slug (batch 1/2).

CONNECTION: Solipsism as the explicit spine — "the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world"

  • Crux: communication-solipsism (new-slug candidate, carried from batch 2; else none)
  • Early text: quote Burgess epigraph: "As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse," [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p2]; Mark's "central delusion": "Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p426]; and J.D.'s adman's inversion: "Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows... we are, always, faces in a crowd. It's Steelritter's meat." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p472].
  • IJ echo: IJ's communication-and-solipsism spine — the impossibility of getting inside another person's head, and isolation experienced even within a crowd or a relationship. Nearest IJ register: the father/son failure-to-converse of the "professional conversationalist" scene (scene 005, pp. 27–31); the Marathe/Steeply debates on what, if anything, one can share or die for across the gap between selves (scene 035, pp. 105–109; scene 088, pp. 418–430).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Central to IJ but treated here as a shared preoccupation, not a plot prefiguration — no specific IJ scene is anticipated; the shared problem is. Note the story stages both poles at once: the private-solipsist (Mark) and the adman who monetizes solipsism (J.D. "brings crowds into being" out of everyone's conviction that "only we" feel what we feel), which is exactly the loneliness IJ's entertainment-culture both produces and sells to.

CONNECTION: TV as vapid comfort — "a womb with a view," the entertainment you've already seen, watched as the only escape

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality (also entertainment-contents)
  • Early text: quote Sternberg on rerun TV: "Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p536]; "That's why entertainment's so important. That's why TV's the total balls. When it's vapid. Like it's meant to be." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p528]; Mark: "It is pretty much the only escape" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p529].
  • IJ echo: The Entertainment as the asymptote of exactly this comfort-viewing — passive, regressive, total (the Entertainment as EUP's malignantly addictive television carried to its limit, continuous with real TV). The televisual/ad-industry history dramatized in Mario's puppet film (scene 087, pp. 410–418); the Medical Attaché's comfort-viewing that becomes catatonia (scene 007, pp. 33–37).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: "A womb with a view" — the viewer infantilized into secure regression — is close to the Entertainment's theorized content (the crib's-eye/maternal address that returns the viewer to infancy), and the boys' defense of vapidity-as-virtue is the EUP thesis IJ literalizes. Held at shared-preoccupation: this is the ambient TV-culture argument IJ shares with EUP, not a device-level prefiguration.

CONNECTION: Fear manufactured and sold, turned into desire — with children as a special, guarded market

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Early text: quote Hogan's research subject "is a born consumer, a micromarket all to himself, full of desire and fear and vice versa, the perfect target for the next wave of targeting campaigns" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p283]; J.D.: "We produce what makes you want to need to consume." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p715]; and the guarded children's angle — Mark: "Is there a different list for kids?" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p290], Hogan: "Not at liberty," [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p291].
  • IJ echo: IJ's entertainment/ad apparatus as the manufacture and weaponization of desire and fear — the InterLace/televisual-advertising history in Mario's puppet film (scene 087, pp. 410–418) — and the specific worry about children as a market/target: ONAN executives discussing an anti-Entertainment public-service ad aimed at kids (scene 168, pp. 876–883).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: The "different list for kids... Not at liberty" beat is a genuine small rhyme with IJ's own scene of adults strategizing about children and the lethal Entertainment; J.D.'s doctrine that fears and desires are "built" ("Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation." [:p715]) is the EUP account of engineered appetite. Kept at shared-preoccupation — the mechanism is shared, the samizdat-specific device is not present. (Cite-as-written counter-position: the story itself rebuts J.D.'s manufacture doctrine through Magda — "Fear and desire are already married. Freely. One's impaled the other since B.C. What you're scared of has always been what moved you. And where you're heading has always been your real end, your Desire." [:p799] — the fear/desire mechanics are contested inside the text, which further supports the shared-preoccupation weighting over any device-level claim.)

CONNECTION: The seductive lulling "You are loved" — the pacifying maternal address that closes the story

  • Crux: entertainment-contents
  • Early text: quote the novella's direct-address close: "Close your eye... Relax. Lie back. I want nothing from you. Lie back. Relax... Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p909], resolving to "For whom? / You are loved." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p910]–[:p911]; inside the inner story, L—— "wishes Dave to tell her, instead of that he loves her, that she is loved. Her father used to say it as he tucked her gently into his USMC-surplus poncho-liner at bedtime" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p841].
  • IJ echo: The Entertainment's rumored content — a veiled/blurred maternal figure, filmed from a crib's-eye POV, telling the infantilized viewer they are sorry / that they are loved; Molly Notkin's account of Joelle's role and the film's maternal/apology conceit (scene 159, pp. 787–795); Joelle interviewed about her role (scene 178, pp. 938–941).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: The ending's second-person seduction — "lie back," "I want nothing from you," a "love song" that resolves into the passive "You are loved" — is startlingly close to how IJ theorizes the Entertainment's pull: a caregiver's voice addressing a passive, reclining viewer with "you are loved." The passive voice ("to be loved," not "I love you") is a load-bearing motif in both the inner story and the maternal-apology reading. Kept at shared-preoccupation rather than prefiguration: Westward deploys it as a formal/tonal address to the reader, not as a described lethal artifact, and the IJ-content reading is itself a theory, not settled text.

CONNECTION: The spinning wheel and the reclaiming curve — the annular/spin imagination

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Early text: quote J.D.'s hobby of watching spins: "You stare into a spinning thing, stare hard: you can see something inside the spin sputter, catch, and seem to spin backwards inside the spin, against the spin." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p44]; the closing image, the towed car's free wheel: "something unseen inside the blur of spokes seems to sputter, catch, and spin against the spin, inside." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p908]; and the flat land where "you can see right to the edge of where everything curves" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p823].
  • IJ echo: IJ's annular / Sierpinski-gasket organizing design — recursion and return, the line that curves back (a whole-book structural property, no single scene).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: Lyndon's "the giant curve that informs straight lines will bring you around" and its "go west... Bodega Bay" line ([lyndon:p400]) read as an internal bridge to this title story's whole westward frame. The archive's ruling: the bridge is real as an intra-GWCH bridge, but the westward-empire frame itself has no strong IJ echo (IJ is not organized around westward expansion). The IJ-relevant residue is the spin/curve/annular figure, which recurs strongly here (J.D.'s spin-watching; the final spinning-wheel image; the flat land curving to its own horizon; the novella's own return from the "For whom" epigraph to the closing "For whom?"). Weighted shared-preoccupation, not prefiguration: the image recurs but Westward is not itself structurally annular the way the whole of IJ is.

CONNECTION: The author's art licensed into commerce — Ambrose's Funhouse as franchise blueprint, the artwork's afterlife as product

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Early text: J.D. on the deal: "It sold books, it'll sell mirrored discotheque franchises. The criticism'll be what fills the seats with fannies." [:p31]; and on the source text: "But for instance this story we had to use to blueprint the franchise campaign off of... that For Whom story, in Sixty-Seven. Liked the concept. Did not like the story. Do not like stories about stories." [:p652]; the artists' side folding: "Creative programs are one reason the whole Funhouse franchise thing's finally gotten off the ground. Writing teachers don't press. They know when to concede. They defer to people who know what's what in an industry." [:p607]; the product itself: "Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque." [:p141].
  • IJ echo: the artwork that escapes its maker into commerce and weaponization — JOI's auteur cartridge becoming "the samizdat," a commodity contended for by states and terrorists (scene 029, pp. 87–92; scene 159, pp. 787–795 on the film's making vs. its use); and the InterLace absorption of the art/broadcast sphere into subscription commerce (scene 087, pp. 410–418).
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: A later addition, easy to miss: Westward's own authorship-vs-commerce knot. The chain is structurally close to IJ's: an artist's self-referential story ("that For Whom story") is licensed by an adman as the "blueprint" of a mass-entertainment venue where the audience is to be consumed (the Reunion) — the art's afterlife as product, past authorial intent. Held at shared-preoccupation, not prefiguration: no attested genealogy links this transaction to the samizdat plot, and the beat is satire of the Barth/commerce embrace; it composes with (rather than duplicates) the last-commercial block above.

Themes

Entertainment (the total/terminal entertainment; TV-as-comfort; the maternal "you are loved" address) · irony/metafiction and the EUP program (the anti-Entertainment aesthetic; art licensed into commerce) · communication/solipsism (the Burgess epigraph; Mark's central delusion; solipsism monetized) · anhedonia / the sealed-off interior (Mark Nechtr → Hal) · advertising and engineered desire/fear (children as market) · annular/spin structure (the reclaiming curve, the wheel against the spin).

Cross-references

  • girl-with-curious-hair — the collection note (stories 1–9; this novella is the collection's closer, treated standalone). The Lyndon reclaiming-curve bridge and the collection's anhedonia and communication/solipsism threads land here at their most concentrated.
  • e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the essay this novella twins: Westward is the EUP program in fiction four years before the essay; the irony-as-armor and fiction-that-reaches-the-reader material cross-cite.
  • IJ anchors most cited by the blocks above: scene 029 (pp. 87–92, the samizdat's introduction), scene 159 (pp. 787–795, Molly Notkin on the film), scene 005 (pp. 27–31, professional conversationalist), scene 135 (pp. 692–698, Kate Gompert/anhedonia), scene 087 (pp. 410–418, Mario's InterLace/ad-history film), scene 168 (pp. 876–883, the kids'-PSA discussion), scene 178 (pp. 938–941, Joelle interviewed).

Notable passages

All [e-text]; locators are paragraph indices:

  • "As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse," —Anthony Burgess [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p2]
  • "For whom is the Funhouse fun?" —Lost in the Funhouse [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p4]–[:p5]
  • "Advertising will have finally arrived at the death that's been its object all along. And, in Death, it will of course become Life. The last commercial." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p476]
  • "The way to make a story a Funhouse is to put the story itself in one. For a lover. Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p659]
  • "metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love" [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p662]
  • "Please don't tell anybody, but Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p663]
  • "either he doesn't feel anything, or he doesn't feel anything." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p423]
  • "Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p426]
  • "Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p536]
  • "We produce what makes you want to need to consume." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p715]
  • "But ring meat," he says, "and you can bet your life you'll eat a bell. And like it." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p750]
  • "Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p472]
  • "It's a love song." / "For whom?" / "You are loved." [westward-the-course-of-empire-takes-its-way:p909]–[:p911]