A collapsed heart arrives one postponed prayer at a time.
This is not a sequel of my earlier essay with the same title. It is substantially different from the first post. Which appeared in this site almost a year ago.
The Quran mentions *qalb* (heart) 132 times. But *qalb* is not merely the physical organ. In Arabic, it is the seat of thought, feeling, perception, and will at once—a unity that English usually divides into "mind" and "heart." It is the faculty through which a person perceives reality and settles what he loves. The word itself comes from a root meaning "to turn" or "to overturn," suggesting something never fixed but always in motion. Even the familiar invocation, "O Turner of Hearts," rests on this understanding: the heart is something that turns, and with it, the whole person.
I have long been fascinated by words like *qalb* and the Bengali *mon*—words that seem to name an inner life English often has to describe with several different terms.
*Age Is a Clock in Reverse* remains my favorite title. Since first posting this essay ten months ago, I found myself returning to it again and again. I initially thought I was writing a sequel; it gradually became an addendum, and eventually a complete reworking of the original. I suspect I will return to it again.
On that typical summer morning, when you woke, the sun seemed not to have moved since the day before, as if it too had stopped counting. Everyone else still dreamed. With half-shut eyes you floated barefoot to the restroom, and the face waiting in the mirror was older than the one you had fallen asleep inside. You squinted, asking the glass to take it back. The glass held. A number you had never been shown was running down behind the reflection, and had been running down for years, while you went on believing you were adding to yourself. Somewhere underneath that, the breath had already started coming harder.
A knock trembled at the door, faint, and for a moment sound and sight came loose from each other. You had been here before—yesterday, or years ago; the clock that should have told you refused. You reached for where you were and found no floor under the question. Even the silence throbbed, pressing on the chest, and you shut your eyes against it, the way a child shuts his eyes and trusts the dark to answer. From the dark a voice came, almost yours but standing a little apart: Why does it matter where you are? You wanted to say that a person has to know the when and the where of himself to stay a person at all. The voice was easy to argue with. You could not make the words rise.
You were a man of routines and good standing, and that morning your body simply went out from under you—severe dehydration, the doctors said, once there were doctors, once there was a room and people leaning over it. How could such a thing be? The question went around and around, a Ferris wheel turning in fog. Your elbow was bruised, blood had dried across one eyebrow, and the body's small complaints reached you faintly, from far off. Lucky, they said. Could have been worse, at your age. The words drifted past. The body can take years of neglect and keep its feet; it was the other thing that had failed—the qalb, where thought and feeling are still one movement. Yours had gone dry long before your body did. Holding off that emptiness had cost you everything you had. Then nothing. That was the last thing you clearly remember.
The trouble was not that you had wandered. It was that every answer you trusted sent you back into the same cage. You searched it faithfully until the searching itself became another habit.
To go looking is to claim that you know what you have lost.
Meanwhile, what had gone missing waited somewhere beyond the questions you knew how to ask.