The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson

But the older he got, the more he understood in how many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he never felt it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street in a Shanghai thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching the rain dribble from the rim of his hat. The most intense and clear sensations of his life had flooded into his young and defenseless mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the desperadoes were out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in later life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty years he felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm