Pico Iyer is a brilliant travel writer (his Video Nights in Kathmandu is a real standout) whose latest NYT editorial deals with the circadian violence wrought by jetlag and global communalism — a theme near and dear to my Eastern Standard Tribalist's heart, especially when articulated in such beautiful, compellingly drunken language.
The lure of modern travel, for many of us, is that we don't go from A to B so much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often, we end up somewhere between the two, not quite one, and not quite the other — in an airport, perhaps, that is and isn't the place we left and the place we think we're going to. Jet lag, in some ways, is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent, I often feel, of some long, gray airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to another. It speaks, you could say, for much in the accelerated world where we speed between continents and think we have conquered both space and time.
And, yet, of course — this is its power — it isn't just a metaphor. It is painfully real, as real as the words that are coming out slurred or as that piece of paper on which we have methodically added two plus two and come up with three. We have been placed at a tilt, and the person who emerges from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the superdry sinuses that come from flying 500 miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin.