Imaan Farooq Sheikh’s Reviews > Time Lived, Without Its Flow > Status Update

A life of no time can’t be recounted. Your very condition militates against narrative.

Agreed. If we couldn't experience time, our frame of reference for narration wouldn't exist either. For how could we ascertain what happened before or what after?

By what means are we ever to become re-attached to the world?

A very valid question that every person in mourning must have reflected on.

Previously I hadn’t believed that speech is simply the translation of something already formulated in thought. Now I was faced with the evidence that sometimes it is, but that the translation can fail.

I don't think there can be a better way to put this into words.

I read on rapidly about the discovery of the corpse in a still-running bath, its good musculature (at that, he’d have brightened up), its chest cavity opened up by means of the conventional incision, the skull sawed so that the brain could be lifted out, the enlarged heart dissected on removal, the fluids in lungs and bladder inspected and measured.

I am speechless by the skill of this author.

I was my two eyes set burning in my skull. Behind them there was only vacancy.

How poignant and dreadful at the same time. Feeling nothing but emptiness behind your eyes as if the whole world could show you nothing that would fill the void left by losing someone.

What a finely vigorous thing a life is; all its delicate complexity abruptly vanished. Almost comical. A slapstick fall.

The imagery and the emotion behind it flow so well. Just a few pages in and I am hooked.

Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forward towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time.

I love the way this connects writing and narration to time and the state of being arrested in it.