The most brilliant epigraph in the history of literature (I´m making a sweeping claim not out of omniscience but wild enthusiasm) comes at the beginning of Gravity´s Rainbow:

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.—Wernher Von Braun."

When I first read those words, as a college freshman, I took them at face value—as scientific proof (very much in vogue at the time) of the reality of the spiritual realm. I had no idea that Von Braun, developer of the V-2, was Hitler´s chief rocket scientist. Still less did I know of his salvation at the hands of American troops, as Berlin fell, or of his subsequent rehabilitation in the United States, where he became Nixon´s chief rocket scientist and a member of the nasa team that put the first man on the moon (no wonder Von Braun believed in life after death).

Let´s appreciate everything this epigraph accomplishes: It stems from, and summons, the historical period Pynchon writes about; it simultaneously inspires and lampoons religious sentiment; and, with savage irony, it comes out of the mouth of someone personifying the novel´s central theme—that the Powers That Be operate behind the scenes, owing allegiance to no nation or ideology.