All 3 Uses of
abstract
in
Turtles All the Way Down
- The White River is beautiful in the abstract—blue herons and geese and deer and all that stuff—but the actual water itself smells like human sewage.
p. 19..4 (definition 1) *abstract = of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
- I wasn't not a threat, but couldn't say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down.
p. 211..5 (definition 1)
- The rest of the art was cool, too—big abstract paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, an assemblage of old wooden chairs precariously stacked to the ceiling, a huge photograph of a kid jumping on a trampoline alone in a vast harvested cornfield—but Mychal's was my favorite, and not just because I knew him.
p. 261..5 (definition 2) *abstract = not imitating objects of nature
Definitions:
-
(1) (abstract as in: abstract thought) of a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance
-
(2) (abstract as in: abstract art) not representing or imitating external reality or the objects of nature