Lest I be accused of laying claim to the mistaken belief that Pynchon spends the entirety of Against the Day describing and/or talking about absolutely nothing, let me lay out this paragraph like a four-course meal for the five senses:

Lake and Deuce were married over on the other side of the mountains in a prairie church whose steeple was visible for miles, at first nearly the color of the gray sky in which it figured as little more than a geometric episode, till at closer range the straight lines began to break up, soon slipping every which way, like lines of a face seen too close, haggard from the assaults of more winters than anybody still living in the area remembered the full count of, weathered beyond sorrowful, smelling like generations of mummified rodents, built of Engelmann spruce and receptive to sound as the inside of a parlor piano. Though scarcely any music ever came this way, the stray mouth-harpist or whistling drifter who did pass through the crooked doors found himself elevated into more grace than the acoustics of his way would have granted him so far.

- from Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

From a distance, sure, the church is as abstract as any math can be. But up close? It's seasons, it's memory, it's sound. It stinks. It's hard. It's quite real.

Which is just one example of course but I rather like this one. Something about those straight lines breaking up that speaks to me. Not sure why, though.