The Museum Of Innocence

The Museum Of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk

If a man could pass thro' Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke -Aye? And what then? - from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now", even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: if a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, busy as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant these mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.

THIS DEPICTION of the internal organs of the human body is taken from an advertisement for Paradison, a painkiller on display in the window of every pharmacy in Istanbul at the time, and I use it here to illustrate to the museum visitor where the agony of love first appeared, where it became most pronounced, and how far it spread. Let me explain to readers without access to our museum that the deepest pain was initially felt in the upper left-hand quadrant of my stomach. As the pain increased, it would, as the overlay indicates, radiate to the cavity between my lungs and my stomach. At that point its abdominal presence would no longer be confined to the left side, having spread to the right, feeling rather as if a hot poker or a screwdriver were twisting into me. It was as if first my stomach and then my entire abdomen were filling up with acid, as if sticky, red-hot little starfish were attaching themselves to my organs. As the pain grew more pervasive and intense, I would feel it climb into my forehead, over the back of my neck, my shoulders, my entire body, even invading my dreams to take a smothering hold of me. Sometimes, as diagrammed, a star of pain would form, centered on my navel, shooting shafts of acid to my throat, and my mouth, and I feared it would throttle me. If I hit the wall with my hand, or did a few calisthenics, or otherwise pushed myself as an athlete does, I could briefly block the pain, but at its most muted I could still feel it like an intravenous drip entering my bloodstream, and it was always there in my stomach; that was its epicenter.
Despite all its tangible manifestations, I knew that the pain emanated from my mind, from my soul, but even so I could not bring myself to cleanse my mind and deliver myself from it. Inexperienced in such feeling, I was, like a proud young officer ambushed in his first command, forced into a mental rout. And it only made matters worse that I had hope-with every new day, new dreams, new reasons that Füsun might appear at the Merhamet Apartments-which by making the agony bearable prolonged it.

I remember my heart pounding with hopeless hope as I raced down Tesvikiye avenue. Fueled by the certitude that seeing her would restore me, I gave no thought to what I might say. The moment I saw her, my pain would disappear, at least for a time- this I knew

Life had receded from me, losing all the flavor and color I'd found in it until that day. The power and authenticity I'd once get in things (though, sad to say, without fully realizing it) was now lost. Years later, when I took refugee in books, I found, in a work by Gérard de Nerval, the best expression of the crude dullness I was feeling at that time. After understanding that he has lost forever the love of his life, the poet, whose heartbreak eventually leads him to hang himself, writes somewhere in his Aurélia that life has left him with nothing but "Vulgar distractions."

For the sake of any readers who are amazed that I could visit Fusun and her family (it seems so clinical to call them the Keskins) for eight years, and who wonder how I can speak so breezily about such a long interval--thousands of days--I would like to say a few words about the illusion that is time, as there is one sort of time we can call our own, and another--shall we call it "official" time?--that we share with all others. It is important to elaborate this distinction, first to gain the respect of those readers who might think me a strange, obsessed, and even frightening person, on account of my having spent eight lovelorn years trudging in and out of Fusun's house, but also to describe what life was like in that household.
Let me begin with the big clock on the wall: it was German-made, cased in wood and glass, with a pendulum and a chime. It hung on the wall right next to the door, and it was there not to measure time, but to be a constant reminder to the whole family of time's continuity, and to bear witness to the "official" world outside. Because television has taken over the job of keeping time in recent years, and did so more entertainingly than did the radio, this clock (like hundreds or thousands of other wall clocks in Istanbul) was losing its importance.

When people come to visit my Museum and view all the Keskins' old possessions- especially all these broken, rusting clocks and watches that haven't worked for years- I want them to notice how strange they are, how they seem to exist out of time, how they have created among themselves a time that is theirs alone. this is the timeless world whose air I inhaled during my years with Fusun and her family.
Beyond this timeless space was the "official" time outside, with which we kept in touch through television, radio, and the call to prayer; when we talked about finding out what time it was, we were organising our relations with the outside world, or so I felt.
Fusun did not adjust her watch because life as she lived it called for a clock that was accurate to the second, so that she could be punctual for work or some meetings; like her father, the retired civil servant, she did so as a way of acceding to a directive signalled to her straight from Ankara and the state, or so it seems to me. We looked at the clock that appeared on the screen before the news much as we looked at the flag that appeared on the screen, while the national anthem was playing at the end of the broadcasting day: as we sat in our patch of the world, preparing to eat supper or bring the evening to a close by turning off the television, we felt the presence of millions of other families, all doing likewise, and the throng that was the nation, and the power of what we called the state, and our own insignificance. It was when we were watching flags, Ataturk programs, and the official clock (once in a while, the radio would refer to the "national time") that we were the most keenly aware that our messy and disordered domestic lives existed outside the official realm.
In physics Aristotle makes a distinction between Time and the single moments he describes as the "present." Single moments are- like Aristotle's atoms- indivisible, unbreakable things. But time is the line that links these indivisible moments. Though Tarik Bey asked us to forget Time - that line connecting one present moment to the next- no one except for idiots and amnesiacs can succeed in forgetting it altogether. A person can only try to be happy and forget Time, as this we all do. If there are readers who sneer at the things my love for Fusun taught me, at these observations that arise from my experiences during the eight years at the house in Cukurcuma, I would like to ask them please to be careful not to confuse forgetting about Time with forgetting about clocks and calendars. Clocks and calendars don't exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them. When looking at the black-and-white clock that appeared on the screen every evening, just before the news, it was not Time we remembered but other families, other people, and the clocks that regulated our business with them. It was for this reason that Fusun studied the clock on the television screen to check if she'd adjusted her watch "perfectly," and perhaps it was because I was looking at her with love that she smiled so happily- and not because she'd remembered time.
My life has taught me that remembering time - that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present- is for most of us a rather painful business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments, or, as in our museum, the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realization that this line per se has no real meaning - a sense that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore- we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the "present" can bring us enough happiness to last a century, as they did if Fusun smiled, in the days when I was going to Cukurcuma for supper. I knew from the beginning that I was going to the Keskin house hoping to harvest enough happiness to last me the rest of my life, and it was to preserve these happy moments for the future that I picked up so many objects large and small that Fusun had touched, and took them away with me. [...]. If we can learn to stop thinking of our lives as a line corresponding to Aristotle's Time, treasuring our time instead for its deepest moments, each in turn, then waiting eight years at your beloved's dinner table no longer seems such a strange and laughable obsession but rather (as I would discover much later) assumes the reality of 1,593 happy nights at Fusun's dinner table. Today I remember each and every evening I went to supper in Cukurcuma - even the most difficult, hopeless, most humiliating evenings - as happiness.

Sometimes I would forget about Time altogether, and nestle into "now" as if it were a soft bed

After six weeks they got me started on physical therapy. Learning to walk again felt like starting life over, and as I embarked on my new existence, I thought about Fusun constantly. But thinking about her now had no connection to the future, or to the desire I'd once felt; slowly Fusun became a dream of the past, the stuff of memories. This was unbearably painful, now that suffering for her no longer took the form out desiring her, but of pitying myself. I was at this point -hovering between fact and remembrance, between the pain of loss and its meaning - when the idea of a museum first occurred to me

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of time