Chapter 1: Section 5: Page 38: Line 58 (640)

 All through their long discussion they had been walking, walkers in the urban unmappable, and had reached a remote and unfamiliar part of the city—in fact, an enormous district whose existence neither, till now, had even suspected.

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This is like a one sentence distillation of Chapter Three of Gravity's Rainbow, "In the Zone." The landscape becomes an analogy of the mental state of the person/people traversing it. It also sounds like an elevator pitch for a Nick Hornby novel.

This highlights my main problem in college. I feel like those three sentences are enough and the people interested in this topic would get it. But my professor would invariably send the paper back with the middle line underlined and a big red "EXPLAIN" scrawled across the margin. And I'd think, "Who are you, Professor Dumb? Explain that!" And then I'd refuse to explain because I was fine with getting a C grade.

But I guess if I had to explain because I doubt the ability of other people to understand the most simple observations, I'd probably say that the dissolution of a long time loving relationship feels like wandering into an enormous district heretofore unknown to either participant. The world, as a couple, had been mapped out in a very rigid and well-defined way. But now they were "walkers in the urban unmappable," meaning they were in a space within civilization (urban) unaccounted for by anybody up until that moment. A break-up is unthinkable because if you're thinking of breaking up, you're already broken up. In a situation where both parties are seemingly taken by surprise (Lew by not knowing anything about the reason for the break up and Troth upended by rumor, speculation, and gossip), the drama of the break-up is wild virgin jungle being hacked through by the two of them.

Now see? That explanation also takes care of the whole Nick Hornby elevator pitch part! As for the Gravity's Rainbow comparison, if you've read it, you get it. If you haven't, how the fuck am I going to explain it in one blog post when it takes Pynchon himself four hundred pages to do it?!