Life Journey from a Reader’s Perspective — Book: Istanbul
Around 2006, I was going to visit one of my elementary school teachers. While pondering what gift I should bring, I wandered around the bookstore, hoping to pick up a book with good taste and novelty. The book Istanbul was at the front table of the promotion section and caught my attention. I didn’t know what “Istanbul” meant, but it sounded foreign and adventurous. Thus it became my final pick.
Many years later, while studying Architecture in College, I signed up for a short-term study abroad program in Istanbul, Turkey. This book came into my mind, and I started reading it in preparation for the trip. For various reasons, that trip did not happen, and Istanbul holds a persisting and unique place in my heart, and I became increasingly interested in the other work of Orhan Pamuk, the author; I read a few of his other works like My name is Red, Snow and The Museum of Innocence.
Throughout the entire time of reading Orhan Pamuk’s literature, I didn’t know why they captured me; I thought maybe because we shared a similar experience of studying Architecture in college, and tasting the cultural tension between the East and West, the past and the present. Until fairly recently, I tried to introduce a friend who is an influential writer to me. I explored the resonating aspect of Pamuk’s writing and thought the best place to start was Istanbul.
Istanbul is a memoir comprising many essays narrating Pamuk’s impression of the family and the city through the eyes of both children and adults. They are interwoven with his knowledge and understanding of Istanbul and Turkey’s cultural and historical landscape. I want to introduce why Istanbul is such a fascinating work in three scopes.
Childhood and family
The first aspect I like about Istanbul comes from his naive perspective as a kid to make sense of the mundane and brokenness in daily life. In his word, the talent for “prettying life with soothing illusions” (p.85, Another House: Cihangir). The journey of this book starts with Pamuk introducing readers to the apartment he grew up, which housed a museum for hypothetical Western visitors. This highlights an interesting phenomenon discussed throughout the book; it has to do with “everyone know it[Westernization] as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what westernization was good for.” (p.10, The Photographs in the Dark Museum House)
Besides this museum, Pamuk illustrated the condition and layout of the house from his grandma’s point of view.
My grandma, who spent half the day in bed and never made herself up, had positioned the table in such a way that she could see all the way down the long corridor, past the service entrance and the vestibule, and right across the sitting room to the windows that looked out to the street, thus allowing her to supervise everything happening in the house — the comings and goings, the conversations in corners, and the quarreling grandchildren beyond-without getting out of bed. Because the house was always so dark, the reflection of a particular maneuver was often too faint to see, so my grandmother would have to shout to ask what was going on.
(p.119, My Grandmother)
And as much as I can relate, boredom in daily life and fear of family drama is a recurring theme. Pamuk is often able to spark some humor when he recalls these moments. He wrote about the conflicts and arguments between his parent and his mother’s disappearance from time to time.
[My] Brother and I were in a fight to the death and my mother really lost her temper, she would say something like “I’m leaving!” or “I’m going to throw myself out the window” — all to no avail. But whenever she said, “And then your father will marry that other woman!” the candidate for new mother I’d imagine was not one of the women whose names she would sometimes blurt out in a moment of anger but that pale, round, well-meaning, and bewildered nanny.
Because these dramas all took place on the same small stage, and because we almost always talked about the same things and ate the same things, even arguments could be deadly dull, and so I came to welcome these sudden disappearances [of my mother] as a form of release from the terrible curse of boredom; like my mother’s mirrors, they were fun, perplexing poisonous flowers that opened my way into another universe.
…
Most of the quarrels would begin over a meal. In later years, however, it became more convenient to begin the quarrel in my father’s 1959 Opel, because it was harder for combatants to extract themselves from a fast-moving car than it was for them to leave the table. … if we were just out on one of our drives along the Bosphorus, a quarrel would break out within minutes of leaving the house. My brother and I would then make a bet. Would it be after the first bridge or after the first petrol station that my father would brake, make a U-tern, and (like an ill-tempered captain returning his cargo to its place of origin) drop us off at home before taking himself and his car somewhere else?
(p.81, My Mother, My Father, and Various Disappearances)
From these little snippets of the writing of unpleasant events and humorous interpretations, Pamuk provides me with a rich vocabulary and texture to recollect and construct the resonating memory of my childhood.
Despite Pamuk’s ability to prettify brokenness, he cannot negate the family’s fate, which is just a snippet of the backdrop of the country.
As my father and my uncle stumbled from one bankruptcy to the next, as our fortune dwindled and our family disintegrated and the quarrels over money grew more intense, every visit to my grandmother’s apartment became a sorrow and took me a step closer to a realization: It was a long time coming, arriving by a circuitous route, but the cloud of gloom and loss spread over Istanbul by the fall of the Ottoman Empire had finally claimed my family too.
(p.17, The Photographs in the Dark Museum House)
City and Sceneries, Past and Present
Because of living in Istanbul, which Pamuk described as “poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history… a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. (p.6, Another Orhan).” In the later chapter, he elaborated:
The melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs.
(p.29, The Destruction of the Pasha’s Mansions: A Sad Tour of the Streets)
Nevertheless, despite the sorrowful mood whenever Pamuk recalled the past, he persistently used his child-like wondering and imagination to embrace the present reality, depicting a rather charming image of the city.
I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul,
I love the early evenings when autumn is slipping into winter, when the leafless trees are trembling in the north wind and people in black coats and jackets are rushing home through the darkening street.
I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down mansions;
only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading. When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets of a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past.
(p.35, Black and White)
These are the sad joys of black-and-white Istanbul:
The crumbling fountains that haven’t worked for centuries;
the poor quarters with their forgotten mosques;
the sudden crowds of school children in white-collared black smocks;
the old and tired mud-covered trucks;
the little grocery stores darkened by age, dust, and lack of custom;
the dilapidated little neighborhood shops packed with despondent unemployed men;
the crumbling city walls like so many upended cobblestone streets;
the entrance to cinemas that begin, after a while, to look identical;
the pudding shops;
the newspaper hawkers on the pavement;
the drunks that roam in the middle of the night;
the pale street lamps;
the ferries going up and down the Bosphorus and the smoke rising from their chimneys;
the city blanketed in snow.
(p38. Black and White)
Pamuk once said he was not very fond of adults in Istanbul, finding them “too clumsy, too heavy, and too realistic. It could be they had once known something of a hidden second world, but they seemed to have lost their capacity for amazement and forgotten how to dream.” (p.24, “Me”) But here Pamuk said snow has the “power to force people out of themselves to act as one; cut off from the world, we were stranded together. On snowy days, Istanbul felt like an outpost, but the contemplation of our common fate drew us closer to our fabulous past.” (p.39, Black and White)
Hüzün
When talking about his childhood and his impression of the city. We can taste the melancholy in Pamuk’s writing. But more than simply a feeling of pensive sadness, Hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy, conveys a sense of deep spiritual loss. Pamuk introduced:
The Prophet Muhammad referred to the year in which he lost both his wife Hatice and his uncle, Ebu Talip, as Senettul huzn, the year of melancholy.
(p.90, Hüzün)
There’s a lot to explore in the root meaning of Hüzün from the history of Islamic culture and how it is relevant to Sofi mysticism:
Hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do enough for Allah in this world.
(p.90, Hüzün)
hence suffers from “grief, emptiness, and inadequacy,” according to a true Sufi follower.
Pamuk evoked the intensity of Hüzün that Istanbul caused him to feel as a child:
I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and — even more important — the way this history is reflected in the city’s “beautiful” landscapes and its people. The Hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.
(p.91, Hüzün)
In such a sense, Hüzün is not the melancholy of a person; it is a sort of illness that millions of Istanbul embraced at its core, and they absorb it with pride and share it as a community. Pamuk used a long narration to paint how Istanbul the city is the very illustration and essence of Hüzün:
I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the street lamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags;
of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance;
of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear;
of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis;
of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets;
of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives;
of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas;
of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men;
of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist;
of the broken seesaws in empty parks;
of ship horns booming through the fog;
of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters;
of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening;
of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques;
of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their façades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust;
of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings;
of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire;
of the markets that empty in the evenings;
of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled;
of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unflinching under the pelting rain;
of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-year-old mansion on the coldest day of the year;
of the crowds of men fishing from the sides of the Galata Bridge;
of the cold reading rooms of libraries;
of the street photographers;
of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theatres, once glittering affairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men;
of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset;
of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming is coming from the south.
of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat;
of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out;
of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters;
of the tired old dolmuses, 1950s Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any Western city but serve here as shared taxis, huffing and puffing up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares;
of the buses packed with passengers;
of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen;
of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees;
of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kodiköy to Karaköy;
of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby;
of the clock towers no one ever notices;
of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire;
of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken;
of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the officials”;
of the readers’ letters, squeezed into a corner of the paper and read by no one, announcing that the dome of the neighborhood mosque, having stood for some 375 years, has begun to cave in and asking why the state has not done something;
of the girls who read Big Sister Güzin’s column in Freedom, Turkey’s most popular newspaper;
of the beggars who accost you in the least likely places and those who stand in the same spot uttering the same appeal day after day;
of the powerful whiffs of urine that hit you on crowded avenues, ships, passageways, and underpasses;
of the man who has been selling postcards in the same spot for the past forty years;
of the reddish-orange glint in the windows of Üsküdar at sunset;
of the earliest hours of the morning, when everyone is asleep except for the fisherman heading out to sea;
of that corner of Gülhane Park that calls itself a zoo but houses only two goats and three bored cats, languishing in cages;
of the third-rate singers doing their best to imitate American vocalists and Turkish pop stars in cheap nightclubs, and of first-rate singers too;
of the bored high school students in never-ending English classes where after six years no one has learned to say anything but “yes” and “no”;
of the immigrants waiting on the Galata docks;
of the fruits and vegetables, garbage and plastic bags and wastepaper, empty sacks, boxes, and chests strewn across abandoned street markets on a winter evening;
of beautiful covered women timidly bargaining in the streets;
of young mothers struggling down streets with their three children;
of all the ships in the sea sounding their horns at the same time as the city comes to a halt to solute the memory of Atatürk at 9:05 on the morning of November tenth;
of the cobblestone staircase with so much asphalt poured over it that its steps have disappeared;
of marble ruins that were for centuries glorious street fountains but now stand dry, their faucets stolen;
of the apartment buildings in the side streets where during my childhood middle-class families-of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and their wives and children-would sit in their apartments listening to the radio in the evenings, and where today the same apartments are packed with knitting and button machines and young girls working all night long for the lowest wages in the city to meet urgent orders;
of the view of the Golden Horn, looking toward Eyüp from the Galata Bridge;
of the simit vendors on the pier who gaze at the view as they wait for customers;
of everything being broken, worn out, past its prime;
of the storks flying south from the Balkans and northern and western Europe as autumn nears, gazing down over the entire city as they waft over the Bosphorus and the islands of the Sea of Marmara;
of the crowds of men smoking cigarettes after the national soccer matches, which during my childhood never failed to end in abject defeat: I speak of them all.
(p.94–99, Hüzün)
In Pamuk’s more than sixty short moments, we can perceive Hüzün in the stagnation, dilapidation, abruptness, and a little absurdity of history in the current context of Istanbul from the lives of people of various professions and identities. Even if not everyone in Istanbul recognizes the significance of Hüzün, they are subconsciously integrated into it as a whole. In Pamuk’s words:
Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.
(p.106, Hüzün)
This melancholy temperament makes people busy and restless in the endless confused world, forming an aloof but somewhat deformed pride.
The Hüzün of Istanbul suggests nothing of an individual standing against society; on the contrary, it suggests an erosion of the will to stand against the values and mores of the community and encourages us to be content with little, honoring the virtues of harmony, uniformity, humility. Hüzün teaches endurance in times of poverty and deprivation; it also encourages us to read life and the history of the city in reverse. It allows the people of Istanbul to think of defeat and poverty not as a historical end point but as an honorable beginning, fixed long before they were born. So the honor we derive from it can be rather misleading. But it does suggest that Istanbul does not bear its Hüzün as an incurable illness that has spread throughout the city, as an immutable poverty to be endured like grief, or even as an awkward and perplexing failure to be viewed and judged in black and white; it bears its Hüzün with honor.
(p.105, Hüzün)
After exploring much text of Istanbul in three different scopes, I understood why I like it so much. Orhan Pamuk, as an author who lived in a place and culture I had been curious about yet unfamiliar with, spoke out my shared nostalgic longings toward good things that are gone forever with a delightful yet profound touch. I also started to see, not just in the heart of the people of Istanbul but also in me and people who lived in other places, we all have this Hüzün haunted by our obscure past in the deepest heart. We may not know what exactly it is. Still, even if it points to our sadness, shame, and brokenness, even if it creates a void that cannot be filled by any things from the old or new times, we’d like to guard it with honor and pride so that we can repeat the same motions and activities day after day.
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart,
yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
