Read in the marvelous novel by Thomas Pynchon called "The Crying of Lot 49":

"She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto avast 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 out-ward 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 revelational so trembled just past the threshold of her understanding."

Why do I blog this? No wonder I liked this quote after two weeks driving here and there in the US with such a book in my hands. See also Computer motherboards, citadels and Michel Houellebecq.