A reasonably long para, in the Proustian tradition:
----
Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and
found the singer to be a child of not more than sixteen, with
white-blond, hip-length hair and breasts perhaps too large for her
slender frame.
"I am Hedwig Vogelsang," she informed him, "and my
purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man."
Whereupon the musicians, hidden from them in an alcove behind a hanging
arras, struck up a kind of schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the
sudden scent of musk, brought in a puff to his nostrils by interior
winds which could not have arisen by accident, seized her round the
waist and wheeled with her across the room, and out, and through a
bedroom lined with mirrors round a canopied four-poster and into a long
gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its length by yellow
daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a Rhine
valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who'd died
long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond,
untender ladies who'd nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic
gusts of blond sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the
gallery and into a tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high
as the house, narrowing into a chimney and open at the top, so that
one could see the stars in the daytime; finally down three or four steps
to Foppl's own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun,
overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it
the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling,
actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions
and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the
corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a
Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music
Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a
jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a
way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the
wooden planets began to rotate and spin, Saturn's rings to whirl, moons
their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking
up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen the planet
Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic ,
following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves.
Thomas Pynchon
V.
----
In order to get it:
Focus. Concentration. Grasping all levels. Following
the verbs. Following the conjunctions. Moving in circles to reach the
core. One needs all of this to get to him in such scenes. The reward is
well-hidden. Just like in Proust. This is not a wholesaler of
sentences, this is symphonic art that if you're lucky to see in a short
flicker stays with you.
However, it can certainly be skimmed at a first pass, with more iterations to follow. Which I did:-)
The cosmic theme is great also.
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