Yet he felt that even with their lies and half truths the old beliefs were better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.

VOA: special.2010.01.03

Whether that would ever happen, if Pynchon had decided to let us in on the secret, I don't know. Pynchon, instead, chooses to end the novel before that moment, and so we're left with a kind of emptiness.

如果说Pynchon是想要，让这成为一个谜题的话，那我也不知道，究竟出现了，没有取而代之的是Pynchon选择了,在那一幕之前让小说戛然而止，让我们陷入了，一片空白之中。

耶鲁公开课 - 1945年后的美国小说课程节选

For more than twenty minutes, he floated outside his spacecraft in the emptiness of space.

VOA: special.2009.07.01

He had floated around in the emptiness of space for twenty-one minutes.

VOA: special.2009.06.24