the true form of this city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal watertanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of tv aerials, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems[...]

nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over the city pavements. and, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters, whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meaning.

this is how birds think, or at least this is how mr. palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. “it is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. but the surface is inexhaustible.”

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