Mr. Palomar - pg. 54

The true form of the 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 water tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else, the rigging of TV antennas, 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. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; pealing campaniles; facades of public buildings, in profile and full-face; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half finished; large windows with curtains, and little WC windows; ocher walls and burnt sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions that have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance, as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet, according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes.