There are cities within the city with rhythms within rhythms that overlap and, at times, collide.
It is around the dollar-renminbi rate that the economic might of the United States and a rising China converge and, at times, collide.
It begins by explaining how the Earth's crust is made up of interlocking tectonic plates that move around its surface and at times collide to cause an earthquake.
Beneath the disconnected pointillism, lies an energetic universe through which waves of history, light, time and number flow, at times in concert, at other times colliding.
Here one found cavalry forces reminiscent of Tolstoy, plumed and bannered, at times colliding with the newer weaponry of increasingly industrialised armies.
"The relationship between the United States and Russia is, needless to say, a very important relationship, and it is marked by both shared interests and, at times, colliding and conflicting interests," Secretary of State John Kerry said.
Angelica's mother had rebelled against her privileged background, abandoning the conventional for the unorthodox, but Angelica somehow bridged those two worlds, so that certain upper-class proprieties and affiliations at times collided with her egalitarian instincts.
The effect is more jolting, as if the sanity of the doctors and the illness of the patients were present in the air, at times colliding with a physical force.
The issues animating grass-roots voters — opposition to immigration, worries about wages and discomfort with America's fast-changing demographics — are diverging from and at times colliding with the Republican establishment's interests in free trade, lower taxes, less regulation and openness to immigration.
Despite all the tweaks, McSweeney says the excise tax will, in a few years' time, collide with the "law of unintended consequences".
He was also famous for his imaginative sign-offs, which would begin, for example, "As the delicate mayfly of time collides with the speeding windscreen of fate".
