She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight,
onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all
together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown
earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor
radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed
circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this
high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected,
astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew
even less about radios than about Southern Californians,
there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of
concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd
seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told
her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute
of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the
threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all around the
horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was
painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an
odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or
out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her
heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words
were being spoken.

                                         -- Thomas Pynchon