Flying home to New York, I noticed a disturbing innovation in pre-flight cabin announcements. After the welcomes, exhortations, and promotions the purser itemised the number of passengers (205) and crew (12) on board. Presumably, this is for the ‘black box’ recorder — so the correct complement of dental charts can be assembled should gravity win. But the broadcast concluded in a startlingly metaphysical manner. ‘So,’ she said cheerfully, ‘that’s 217 souls on board.’ Taxiing for takeoff is a disconcerting moment to contemplate the existence of souls, let alone enumerate them. (Do they count pets in the hold? Children in utero? Makers of Faustian pacts?) And it reminded me of William Gibson’s crisply cool novel Pattern Recognition, where he defines jet lag as the time it takes for the soul to catch up with the body: ‘Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.’
In my luggage, thankfully not lost, was a new $90 jacket from the Japanese mega-brand Uniqlo.
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