There's a window, 36 hours or so, not even, after travelling by air between places, places where you've lived for a long time. When you've landed and into the next day, perhaps the evening - then you begin to lose it. It goes very quickly, decaying like a tone in the air. But for a while, inside that window, you're hyper-awake. I'm talking about light, scale, smell, all of it familiar, but for that short while extending beyond the common registers of the familiar until the buildings, river light, the smell of benzene and tidal flats, what have you, become almost stereoscopic, carrying a taste of the unreal - as if the world had been passed through a solution, cleansed.

LRB 19 August 2004 | PDF Download