She was a virgin bride. At the moment of surrendering, she found herself wishing only to become the wind. To feel herself refined to an edge, an invisible edge of unknown length, to enter the realm of air forever in motion over the broken land. Child of the storm.

- from Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon is playing to your heart as much as your head, and he's not afraid of breaking both. Desires to, sometimes, seems like. It's from that place that a paragraph like the above and the following events make me want to give up because I know I'll never think up or dream up ways to hurt you nearly as bad.

And again (and): this realm of the invisible, the untouchable and the unknowable, sometimes a spiritual concern, sometimes a nearly tangible thing, a place or a concept, that echoes and reverberates throughout the novel, acting as a binding agent that holds together the unholdable. The visible whitespace at the corner of your eye pushed front and center and framed for your gaze and contemplation.

The brothers traveled together as far as Mortalidad, the stop nearest Jeshimon, then, because of who might or might not be looking, they said goodbye with little more than the nod you might give somebody who's just lit your cigar for you. No gazing back out the window, no forehead creased with solemn thoughts, no out with the pocket flask or sudden descent into sleep. Nothing that would belong to the observable world.

- from Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon