A Strangeness In My Mind

A Strangeness In My Mind

Orhan Pamuk

I had melancholy thoughts...
A strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for the hour,
Not for that place.
- William Wordsworth, The Prelude

The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the origin and foundation of inequality among men

Mevlut got out and walked toward the back in the darkness. As he was shutting the door on the girl, there was a flash of lightning, and for a moment, the sky, the mountains, the rocks, the trees - everything around him- lit up like a distant memory. For the first time, Mevlut got a proper look at the face of the woman he was to spend a lifetime with.

They would be met by barking dogs every time they crossed a village, only to be plunged once again into a silence so deep that Mevlut wasn't sure whether the strangeness was in his mind or in the world.

"Are you a religious man?"
Mevlut knew by now that this question carried political connotations in the wealthier households

One day he was standing at the window of his room when he noticed that the usual joy and bustle seemed to be missing from the city. He asked his assistant about it, who told him, Your Excellency, we've banned street vendors from entering the city, because they don't have those in Europe and we thought you'd get angry. But it was precisely this which made Ataturk angry. Street vendors are the songbirds of the streets, they are the life and soul of Istanbul, he said. Under no circumstances must they ever be banned. From that day on, street vendors were free to roam the streets of Istanbul

Don't let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.

There were times, too, when with many customers still left to visit, many more homes waiting for them to pass by, his father would walk into a coffee house, leaving his pole and his precious cargo of yogurt outside the door, and slump into a chair with a cup of tea, just sitting there without moving a muscle. This Mevlut could understand.

"You'll learn it all soon enough... You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven't

For one and a half school years, between sixth and seventh grade, Mevlut worried constantly about where to sit in the classroom. The inner turmoil he endured while grappling with this question was as intense as the ancient philosopher's worries over how to live a moral life.

In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.

It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind - James Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man

Mevlut felt he had known Rayiha for years and slowly began to believe that his letters had been meant for someone like her - perhaps even for Rayiha herself.

During these years of unquestioning gratitude for life's blessings, Mevlut was only dimly aware of the gentle passage of time, the death of some pine trees, the way done old timber houses seemed to disappear overnight, the construction of six- or seven-story buildings on those empty plots where kids used to play football and street vendors and the unemployed used to take afternoon naps, and the growing size of the billboards and posters on the streets, just as he barely registered the passing of seasons and the way leaves dried up and fell off trees.

"I don't understand politics" said mevlut.

"Mevlut, we're forty now, we can understand anything" said Suleyman 

When the time came for his own one-room house, Mevlut felt his heart breaking. He observed his whole childhood, the food he'd eaten, the homework he had done, the way things had smelled, the sound of his father grunting in his sleep, hundreds of thousands of memories all smashed to pieces in a single swipe of the bulldozer shovel

"The form of a city changes faster, alas! Than the human heart" -Baudelaire, "The Swan"

What faced him now was a vast wall of windows. The city -powerful, untamed, frighteningly real -still felt unbreachable, even to him. The hundreds of thousands of windows lined up along this wall were like so many eyes watching him. They started out dark in the morning and changed colour throughout the day; at night, they shone with a glow that seemed to turn the night overhanging the city into a sort of daytime. As a child, he had always liked looking at the city lights from afar. there was something magical about them. But he had never seen Istanbul from so far up. It was dreadful and dazzling at once.  Istanbul could still make him flinch, but even now at fifty-five years of age, he still felt the urge to leap right into this forest of staring buildings.

Half an hour later, he'd reached the backstreets of Ferikoy, feeling optimistic that the streets were going to tell him wonderful things that night.

"Boo-zaa", he cried toward the empty street