I suspect that these wind surfers, catching a wave off Kauai’s north coast, have pretty much lost track of the time and find the moments in which they move across the water impossible to account for when they are asked, “What does it feel like to be carried across distance without explicable passage?”

I had about the same response when I learned that Chris had flown from Buenos Ares to New Jersey, from whence his work carried him to San Francisco, returning him to his Manhattan apartment by the end of his work day. What other response but flow is possible? Such travelers as myself, clutching timetables and marking time zones as they pass, end up befuddled in the extreme.

All week I’ve been imagining our journey from the Sonoran Desert to the city of Florence: I get on the airplane to Houston, lose two hours on my watch; get on the plane to Newark, lose another hour; get on the plane to Rome, fix my eyes on the flight monitor, losing another nine; find myself over the middle of France at dawn, and spill out into Fiumicino Aeroporto de Roma in the middle of the next day!

No flow at all. My rumpled clothes and disposition attest to it.

Yet some magician caught me unaware, and without knowing what happened, hurled me into another world where clocks wear the same face, yet point me to places where I have never been. I can’t comprehend and attribute such dullness to jet lag, but when I wake, there it is, another world has inundated mine. I am transported, and like Bottom, awakening from dreams of faerie amour, exclaim: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.”