The work had given him some complete disfunction in his ability to remember and criticize what he had read. Where previous books gave him the absolute words with which to lay out the very exact weaknesses and devices rendering the text melodramatic or inaudible and unkind, his experience with the text he held allowed only one moment for realizing his absolute astonishment, and the next was breathlessness.
We are so accustom to finishing a book. We flip page to page allowing our ear and eye to do the work intended to allow the novel to come alive in our imaginations, and in some way we breathe it into our hearts, or if it is sadistic we allow ourselves pain for the unraveling of narrative. When we've finished we breathe out and the mist or presence of the narrative rambles through us as a babbled machine. We're to suffer the slow fading as time allows us to mash scenes into the forefront of our remembrance, and in many ways, as days are lost on us as monotony in work, we lose the paths a novel has dealt us and embrace the end-feeling, and for him, at the very moment he realized, in his astonishment, he could not breathe.
Conor Robin Madigan