--- I might actually have to read this book.
Particularly after the husband read the first page to me. And the quote doth read:
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town
to the dire and ever-circling wolves of distrupted circadian rhythm.
It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem
stirring fretfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex,
food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option right now.
Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is devoid of edible content as
its designers' display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome,
the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with
some, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save
for a carton containing two dry pucks of Wheatabix and some loose
packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that
its interior smells only of cold and long chain monomers.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London,
that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is
leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the
vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands
of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left
behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour
deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?
Pattern Regcognition by William Gibson. Chapter 1, The Website of Dreadful Night. Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved.
That is---hands down---the best description of jet lag ever written.
Maybe I'll just have to give it a go, even though I never in my life thought I would read a book by William Gibson.
Posted by Kathy at April 1, 2004 11:43 PM | TrackBack