10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

How strange, she thought once again. Could no one else see that she was in dreadful pain? And if they couldn’t, did that mean that it was all in her head, all make-believe?

She couldn’t help sensing that something remained unresolved between them, like a muddled message on a poorly transmitted radio wave, strings of words that, though conveyed, could not be formed into anything coherent.

The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.

And while Leila could see its truth, she thought the teaching was incomplete. It needed to be: Know yourself and know an arsehole when you see one. Knowledge of self and knowledge of arseholes had to go hand in hand.

In her view, human beings resembled peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity.

The pessimists were the first to flee the area, probably; the optimists would have chosen to wait and see how things would turn out. Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.