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"Let us hope," because that is all that's left, hope in stories, the way someone who is about to die will turn to the bible.

Couldn't Saeed and Nadia pretend to be brother and sister? Seems like that would be a lot safer? Also are the robots supposed to be drones?

I like hos they are unsure if they are "making a down payment or being robbed". It's probably both, but with an emphasis on being robbed.

For a moment Saeed sees hope in the boys playing football and it speaks to hope for the future, but the boys are suddenly young men and the ball is a human head. Hope and youth are perverted here.

The "bodies hanging from streetlamps and billboard like a form of festive seasonal decoration" is one of those images that, while it isn't true because this is a work of fiction, is true because it feels true which makes me assume this has happened somewhere in reality. And has it? At what point does a fiction also become a truth? I think of The Painted Bird, that awful book and its truth / fictions of Eastern Europe

The worse the situation gets, the more willing Saeed is to taking risks. As people are executed for being unmarried and having sex, Saeed and Nadia - who are unmarried - do have sex. And the timing is interesting because he chooses this right after the murder upstairs, while the blood is on their ceiling, like the blood stain after having sex the first time, but somehow this loss of virginity hangs above them.

The violence is handled so matter-of-fact, it comes at the end of a paragraph without (much) warning: "The neighbors upstairs were not so lucky; the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away." And that's it, this is all we know other than the man's blood staining the ceiling of Saeed's home. Even the body disappears when they attempt to bury him.

Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night

I love the idea that even dreams have their own reality in that, as Emily believes, they are sent by God which makes them real, in a way. So perhaps that experience we all have when a dream feels so real that we expect it to still be there when we wake up is an experience worth putting more faith in?

It;s like another world is inhabiting the city - they have no control over what happens to them because the BIG events of the war are all around them, but from this point of view it feels as if the war is also such a minor part of their lives, like the weather. Strange that we're so close to the "action" and yet this action is not what we'd assume, it's people holding hands in the dark and saving a potted lemon tree.

Again, past, present and future are one, "and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time". This has been the current all through the novel, a current of time, but the three aspects of time, all of which are interchangeable and relative.

The homeless dead - there's nowhere for anyone to go.

The 'and' used to describe how Saeed's father thought of his wife as his best friend is perhaps the most beautiful and sad 'and' I've ever read. "and his wife had been his best friend" because it defines why he was devastated and what their relationship had been without having to add extra detail. This is profoundly beautifully written novel.

Amazing (heartbreaking) writing to describe her death all in one sentence, as if all of life (and death) is coming at them too fast to even take a breath and also how memory works when we link two distinct events together because of a tragedy. It also speaks to how life goes on while other die, that life is both precious and cheap, that we will be remembered in the same way we remember an apartment we once lived in.

All the letters I can write

Emily was an avid letter writer and this poem was part of a letter to her cousin Eudocia Flynt which included a rose, both an actual rose and this poem describing a rose. I think it's a stretch to attach an overt sexual connotation to this poem (I mean you can, but that simplifies the poem too much). Rather, she is also describing how the parts of language can be used to multiple effects.

Why make it doubt - it hurts it so

This is a heartbreaking poem, made harder in now knowing who "Master" is and what she has done to "Offend the Vision". But perhaps it is the work "Vision" which is a clue since she often writes about the world revealed to her through imagination, so perhaps she upset with herself for not paying attention to her imagination and thus she lost a "Vision" which she can't now recover?

He showed me Heights I never saw

After being shown the highest point revealing the secrets of the world, she still hesitates to agree to put her faith in "He". Perhaps having to be shown something rather than discovering it herself is what she is taking issue with, or perhaps her imagination is so rich she doesn't trust it to reveal the real truth? Either way, her "face withdrew" and could she "further "No"' (know).

The Mountains - grow unnoticed

Emily could be writing about herself as a poet who every day will "grow unnoticed" and she writes only because she must, not for fame or "applause". Yet she also describes "fellowship" in contrast to the lonely work of building a mountain but who is it she desires "fellowship" with? Is she suggesting that the light of the sun (inspiration) spends each night with her in dreams?

It's kinda funny how as the (their) world is ending, Saeed is likely the only boy who doesn't want to have sex with his girlfriend, whereas she does want to. Kind of a nice reversal but for both of them it's a way of hanging onto some sort of normality: he keeping his morality intact, she living life to her fullest - neither of which seem likely as the bombs are falling all around them.

These dark doorways have become the hopeful myth storytelling people tell each other as hope manifesting itself in unexpected ways - a hope that they can escape, that there is relief somewhere, that there is a somewhere to go because here is not anywhere anyone wants to be. There is always a somewhere, even if it exists only in stories.

"One's relationship to windows now changed in the city" is a glorious line!

I love the image of the bookshelf propped up against the window, as if all that education and learning could keep the bombs out, as if the light seeping in around the bookcase was enough light to see by, and not just literally see, but to be illuminated by (the light of education). If our borders were all books, how would the world b better

Beautiful and simply stated that "All agreed he was a fine and delicate man, worryingly so, for these were not times for such men." A lesser writer might have tried to overstate and overplay the emotion here, but by underplaying it the scene is all the more powerful and sad. Fantastic writing. And Hamid is right - these are not times for such men (people) and yet, paradoxically, they are exactly what is needed.

The Sunrise runs for Both

Stunning beautiful poem, especially because she is able to capture the expanse between horizons as if she holds her arms up and outstretched to the glory of the heavens in celebration of all this beauty. And there is an intimacy here in that we share this moment of a day alone, there is no body to bother us, only us and the rotation of the earth through the sky.

"She remembered the boy as shy, with a stutter and a quick mind for mathematics, a good boy, but she could not remember his name" and he's like so many other who were a "good boy" and now are firing a truck mounted machine gun, and probably will be dead soon. How many people like this have come and died through history?

Another door, this time in the city, and another man emerges and this one has a rifle and it seems the "brave man" is helping these other men? Very odd; disturbing. Though fantastic, too.

Consiering the circumstances of a run on the banks and her being sexually assaulted, "a camping stove, some extra fuel, a large box of matches, fifty candles, and a packet of chlorine tablets" are far better than flowers. Though a gun would probably be even better to have since you can get / keep all those supplies and flower with it, as well as defend yourself.

Again he describes a place as having different times, and Nadia comments that she's not sure if the photography (is it Thiery Legalt being referenced?) looks like the past, the present, or the future. And when the cell phone signals are cut, it's like the past again, but a present past, a present past extending into the uncertain future. Same place, different time.

Nadia wants to live whereas Saeed wants only to live. There is a difference, one involves spirit, the other calories. But you can't live on zero calorie soda.

"Saeed prayed for peace and Saeed's father prayed for Saeed and the preacher" prayed for the righteous to be victorious without indicating who that might be - typical. Or is it? How do we know who the righteous are? I mean it's easy to tell when you've got nazi's or something, but what about when it's more subtle? Is everyone righteous or is nobody? Is there even such a thing?

Shame that the only time people often feel "a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this" is when we're tripping on mushrooms. Imagine if we could do this sober? Or outside of art?

Wasn't it a scene in An Unrestored Woman where one of the characters got in an accident with someone far wealthier than they and so they lay down in the street in absolute protestation for fear of what the retribution might be and meanwhile their daughter feels nothing but the shame in all of it. Similar scene here with Saeed nicking his car's mirror on the "shiny black SUV".

"probably less than a hundred [dead]". It's the casual, almost optimistic way this is said, as if less than a hundred was a great outcome.

"tongues of a planet that would one day too be no more" - great line juxtaposed next to the section on how everyone uses a cell phone (though Saeed is far more conservative than Nadia). One day the planet will be silent - again, though maybe that day is coming sooner than what the producers intended.