The world doesn’t offer many experiences as lonely as closing the back cover of a really good book. You’re re-emerging from the most solitary of pursuits, and for just a moment, you hover on the border of the universe you live in and the universe you’re leaving — a liminal territory with a population of one.

That’s how I felt a few minutes ago, as I turned the last page of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. It opens with the best explanation for jet lag that I’ve read yet:

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.

Not unlike finishing a good book…

If you’ve ever questioned the moral impact of what you do for a living, or felt a chill when you learned about the latest new devious marketing technique, or just wondered about loyalty and identity mean when they don’t refer to brands and logos, give it a gander.