“Nothing happened,” he said to me. Except everything happened, I explained to him. In a singular moment, his entire life changed. So, too, did the lives of the sixty people who now worked for him, plus their families, plus the people doing business with him. A moment of frustration and inspiration in a traffic jam had come to define his life.

Jacques Derrida once observed that some of the major events in his life were meetings with books.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.