I knew the feeling that had come over her: The moment of departure. Something I’ve forgotten. Where is it? What is it? But the soul has already taken off, light and swift on its journey. The body lags behind, vacates, deadweight, slow to move on.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol...of man's soul; of his determination...to get outside his body

Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities—until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like
jet lag.

Yang connects the concept of jet lag too to the idea of a lover: “Jet lag describes the site of love as time in which one is alone, e.g. awake alone in the night, socially less compatible and in this time-space of aloneness one can love and be loved without a division of self and the other.”