Close Reading

In this passage of Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine," Baker's matter of fact chattiness but but also cold dispassionate tone expresses his boredom with the everyday life. Baker, while riding a escalator, notices they are "a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors" and meet the lobby's "towering volumes of marble and glass" just above the middle "spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels." Through out all of this passage, Baker expresses himself with fancy yet intimidating words.