Other Colors Read online

  Two months later, my upstairs neighbor at home told me that the university to which he’d sent his concrete sample had sent back a report. The conclusion—as in the case of the inquiry concerning the building in which I had my office—was neither wholly discouraging nor wholly confidence-inspiring. It was up to each of us to decide how to take it, just as it had been a subjective decision on that day to determine whether or not the minaret would fall on us.

  At around the same time, I heard that an old friend who worked in the music business had decided, after passing through Gölçük, the town worst hit by the August earthquake, that he could never again set foot in his Istanbul home; he had moved into the Hilton Hotel, which he thought to be of sounder construction, until that place no longer seemed safe enough either and he took to spending his days outside, doing all his business on his mobile phone, racing up and down the street as if he were in a great hurry. It was said that while he hurried along, never stopping, he would mutter, “Why aren’t we leaving this city, why aren’t we leaving?”

  When it had been impressed on us all that, though the epicenter of the first earthquake was sixty-two miles outside the city, thousands of İstanbullus had died, there was an exodus from the poorer neighborhoods, and that brought down the rents. But most of Istanbul remains in its mostly unsound buildings, taking no precautions. At this point, everything—the importuning of scientists, the credited rumors, the act of forgetting, the deferment of millennium celebrations, the embrace of lovers, the resignation—everything naturalizes the idea of an earthquake and helps us “live with it,” as people now say. The other day, a fresh-faced, recently married, and very cheerful young woman came to my office to discuss a book cover and with great conviction explained her own way of coping.

  “You know an earthquake is inevitable, and that makes you fearful,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “But you live through each moment by acting as if it’s not going to happen at that exact moment. If you don’t, you can’t do anything. But these two thoughts contradict each other. For example, we all know by now that it is very dangerous to be on a balcony after an earthquake. Even so, I’m now stepping out to the balcony,” she told me in a teacher’s voice, and then, opening the door slowly and with care, she stepped out onto the balcony. I stayed where I was, and she stood there looking at the mosque across the street and the view of the Bosphorus behind it. “As I stand here,” she said more volubly, a few moments later through the open door, “I cannot believe that the earthquake will hit at this precise moment. Because if I did believe this, I would be too frightened to stay here.” A while later, she came in from the balcony, shutting the door behind her. “So that’s what I do,” she said, with the faintest of smiles. “I go out onto the balcony, and while I’m there I manage to score a small victory against the earthquake in my head. It’s with little victories like these that we’ll defeat that big earthquake still to come.”

  After she left I went out to the balcony, to admire the minarets and the beauties of Istanbul and the Bosphorus rising from the mist. I’ve lived in this city my entire life. I’ve asked myself the same question as that man pacing the streets, about why a person might not be able to leave.

  It’s because I can’t even imagine not living in Istanbul.

  BOOKS AND READING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  How I Got Rid of Some of My Books

  During the second of the two recent earthquakes—the one that hit Bolu in November—a knocking sound was heard from one end of my library; then for the longest time the bookshelves creaked and groaned. I was lying on the bed in the back room, a book in my hand, watching the naked lightbulb sway above me. That my library should conspire in the earthquake’s wrath, that it should confirm and dignify its message—this frightened me, and the apocalyptic intimations made me angry. The same thing had happened during the aftershocks of the previous weeks. I decided to punish my library.

  This was how, with a strangely clear conscience, I picked 250 books from my shelves and disposed of them. Like a sultan pacing among a crowd of slaves, singling out the ones to be lashed, like a capitalist pointing out the lackeys to be sacked, I made my selection summarily. What I was punishing was my own past, the dreams I’d nurtured when I’d first found these books and picked them up, bought them, taken them home, hidden them, read them, and labored over them so lovingly, imagining what I would think when reading them in the future. On reflection, this seemed less like punishment than liberation.

  The happiness it gave me? This is a good place to begin a discussion of my books and my library. I want to say a few things about my library, but I don’t wish to praise it in the manner of one who proclaims his love of books only to let you know how exceptional he is, and how much more cultured and refined than you. And neither do I wish to seem like those ostentatious booklovers who will tell you they found such and such a rare volume in a little secondhand bookstore in the back streets of Prague. Still, I live in a country that views the nonreader as the norm and the reader as somehow defective, so I cannot but respect the affectations, obsessions, and pretensions of the tiny handful who read and build libraries amid the general tedium and boorishness. All that having been said, the matter I wish to discuss here is not how much I love books but how much I dislike them. The best and quickest way to tell this story is to remember how and why I got rid of them.

  Since we do—to some degree—arrange our libraries so that our friends will see our books as we want them to be seen, an easy way to clear them out is to decide which books we’d prefer to, shall we say, hide or banish altogether, so that our friends won’t see them at all. We can throw large numbers of books away just so no one will know you ever took such nonsense seriously. As we pass from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to youth, this particular obsession takes hold. When my elder brother gave me the books he was ashamed he’d read as a child, and the bound collections of soccer magazines (like Fenerbahçe) that had ceased to interest him, he was killing two birds with one stone. I used the same technique to get rid of many Turkish novels, Soviet novels, bad poetry collections, and sociology texts, not to mention middling examples of village literature, and the left-wing pamphlets I’d collected in the same way as the archivist in The Black Book. In the same manner, I dealt with the popular science books I’d bought periodically and the vanity memoirs about how so-and-so found success, which I could not help reading, and various works of refined pornography, without illustrations, first consigning them anxiously to an obscure corner before throwing them away.

  When I’ve decided to throw a book away, the thrill of degradation masks deep grievances not immediately apparent. What is degrading is not the disquieting thought that this book (a Political Confession, a Bad Translation, a Fashionable Novel, a Collection in Which All the Poems Are Alike and Like All Other Poems) is in my library at all, it is knowing that there was a time when I took this book seriously enough to pay money for it, kept it sitting on my shelves for years, and even read some of it. I’m not ashamed of the book itself, I’m ashamed of having once accorded it importance.

  Here we come to the real issue: My library is not a source of pride but of self-revenge and oppression. Like those who take pride in their education, I too sometimes take pleasure in looking at these books, passing my hand over them, and picking up some of them to read. In my youth, I would imagine myself posing in front of my books, once I’d become a writer. But now there is only the crushing embarrassment of having invested time and money in them, in having carted them home like a porter and then hidden them away; what makes me most miserable is to know I have been “attached” to them. As I’ve grown older, I have perhaps begun to throw away books to convince myself that I possess the sort of wisdom to be expected in the owner of a library made up of books he himself has read. But I keep buying books at a faster rate than I throw them away. And so if I were to compare my library to that of a well-read friend in a rich Western country, his would have many fewer books than mine does. F
ortunately, for me the imperative is not to own good books but to write them.

  A writer’s progress will depend to a large degree on having read good books. But to read well is not to pass one’s eyes and one’s mind slowly and carefully over a text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime. Even the most finely honed personal library is made up of a number of books that are all in competition with one another. The jealousies among these books endows the creative writer with a certain gloom. Flaubert was right to say that if a man were to read ten books with sufficient care, he would become a sage. As a rule, most people have not even done that, and that is why they collect books and show off their libraries. Because I live in a country almost devoid of books and libraries, I at least have an excuse. The twelve thousand books in my library are what compel me to take my work seriously.

  Among them there are perhaps ten or fifteen books I truly love, but I’m not sentimental about this library. As an image, a collection of furniture, a pile of dust, a tangible burden, I don’t like it at all. To feel an intimacy with its contents is like having relations with women whose chief virtue is their being always ready to love us; the thing I love most about my books is that I can pick them up and read them whenever I wish.

  Because I fear “attachments” as much as I fear love, I welcome any pretext to get rid of books. But in the past ten years I’ve found a new excuse, something that never occurred to me before. The authors whose books I bought in my youth and kept and sometimes even read, because they were “our nation’s writers,” and even quite a few of the writers I read in the years that followed—in recent years they have colluded to assemble proof of how bad my own books are. In the beginning I was happy that they took me so seriously. But now I am glad to have a pretext even better than an earthquake for clearing them out of my library. This is how my Turkish literature shelves are quickly losing works by halfwitted, mediocre, moderately successful, bald, male, degenerate writers between the ages of fifty and seventy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  On Reading: Words or Images

  To carry a book in your pocket or in your bag, particularly in times of sadness, is to be in possession of another world, a world that can bring you happiness. During my unhappy youth, the thought of such a book—a book I looked forward to reading—was a consolation that helped me through the school day, as I yawned so much my eyes would fill with tears; later on in life, it helped me bear the boring meetings I attended out of obligation or a desire not to be rude. Let me list the things that make reading something I do, not for the purposes of work or for my edification, but for pleasure:

  1. The pull of that other world I mentioned earlier. This could be seen as escapism. Even if only in your imagination, it is still good to escape the sadness of everyday life and spend some time in another world.

  2. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, reading was central to my efforts to make something of myself, elevate my consciousness, and thereby give shape to my soul. What sort of man should I be? What was the meaning of the world? How far could my thoughts stretch, my interests, my dreams, the lands I could see in my mind’s eye? While following others’ lives, dreams, and ruminations in their stories and their essays, I knew I would keep them in the deepest recesses of my memory and never forget them, the way a small child never forgets his first sight of a tree, a leaf, a cat. With the knowledge I gathered from my reading, I would chart my path to adulthood. Having set out with such childish optimism to make and shape myself, my reading during those years was an intense and playful enterprise that drew deeply from my imagination. But these days I almost never read this way, and perhaps this is why I read so much less.

  3. Another thing that makes reading so pleasurable for me is self-awareness. When we read, there is a part of our minds that resists total immersion in the text and congratulates us on our having undertaken such a deep and intellectual task: in other words, reading. Proust understood this very well. There is, he said, a part of us that stays outside the text to contemplate the table at which we sit, the lamp that illuminates the plate, the garden around us, or the view beyond. When we notice such things, we are at the same time savoring our solitude and the workings of our imagination and congratulating ourselves on possessing greater depth than those who do not read. I understand how a reader might, without going too far, wish to congratulate himself, though I have little patience for those who take pride in boasting.

  This is why, when I talk of my own reading life, I must say this at once: If the pleasures I describe as 1 and 2 were pleasures I could find in film, television, or other media, perhaps I would read fewer books. Perhaps one day it will be possible. But I think it would be difficult. Because words (and the works of literature they make) are like water or like ants. Nothing can penetrate into the cracks, holes, and invisible gaps of life as fast or as thoroughly as words can. It is in these cracks that the essence of things—the things that make us curious about life, about the world—can first be ascertained, and it is good literature that first reveals them. Good literature is a piece of wise counsel that has yet to be given, and as such it has the same aura of needfulness as the latest news; that is mainly why I still depend on it.

  But I think it would be wrong to talk about this pleasure as running counter to—or competing with—the pleasures of watching, of seeing. This may be because, between the ages of seven and twenty-two, I wanted to become a painter and spent those years painting obsessively. For me, to read is to create one’s own mental film version of a text. We may raise our heads from the page to rest our eyes upon a picture on the wall, the scene outside the window, or the view beyond, but our minds do not take these things in: We are still occupied with filming the imaginary world in the book. To see the world imagined by the author, to find happiness in that other world, one must bring one’s own imagination into play. By giving us the impression of being not just spectators of an imaginary world but in part its creators, a book offers us the creator’s bliss in seclusion. And it’s that bliss-in-seclusion that makes reading books, reading great works of literature, so alluring to all and so essential to the writer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Pleasures of Reading

  This summer I reread Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. After finishing certain pages of this wondrous book, my eyes would pull back from the old volume in my hand to gaze at its yellowing pages from afar. (In the same way, when I was drinking a favorite soft drink as a child, I would stop from time to time to gaze lovingly at the bottle in my hand.) As I was carrying the book around with me this summer, I asked myself many times why it was such pleasure just to know the book was at my side. Afterward I would ask myself whether it was even possible to speak about the joy I took in it—to do so without first speaking of the novel itself would be like speaking about my love for a woman I had fallen for without first describing her. This is what I’m trying to do now. (Those who wish to separate the novel from the love of reading novels should skip over every parenthetical below.)

  1. While following the events described in the story (the Battle of Waterloo, the intrigues of love and power in a small principality), I was overtaken by intense emotion. The source of my happiness lay not in the events themselves but in the spiritual and emotional responses they provoked. I experienced the events as emotions, a sort of synesthesia. I experienced the joy of youth, the will to live, the power of hope, the fact of death, and love, and solitude.

  2. As I savored the writer’s nuances, the force of his prose, his powers of observation, his élan, his way of going straight to the heart of the matter, and the sharpness of his intelligence, it seemed to me as if he were whispering all his wisdom in my ear, just for me. Though I knew millions had read this book before me, I felt—for reasons I have not been able to fathom—that in this book there were many passages, many little details, refinements, and understandings, that the writer and I shared and that only the two of us could appreciate. To
be so close in mind and spirit to a writer this brilliant gave me confidence, and on this account, as with all happy people, my self-esteem was buoyed up.

  3. Certain details of the writer’s life (his solitude, his disappointments in love, and the fact that his books were not as well loved as he wished them to be) and the legendary tale about the writing of this novel (Stendhal was said to have based it on old Italian chronicles and dictated it to a secretary over fifty-two days) seemed to me to be the story of my own life.

  4. It was not just the affinity I felt with Stendhal that left its mark on me; many of the scenes he narrates, his descriptions of the landscape, and his portrayal of the epoch (the palace interiors, the figure of Napoleon, the lakes outside Milan and its environs, the scenery of the Alps refracted through the author’s urban sensibilities, as well as the arguments, the murders, and the political intrigues) stayed with me too. Unlike Proust’s hero, I never assumed the identities of other characters or believed these events were happening to me. I was not present in the novel. But from the beginning I enjoyed the excitement of entering a space altogether different from my everyday world, and I studied the interior world of the novel in much the same way as I once studied the liquid inside my soft-drink bottle. This was why I carried the book around with me.

  5. I first read this book (The Charterhouse of Parma) in 1972. When I looked at the passages I had underlined and the notes I had written in the margins on that first reading, I laughed, a sad laugh at my youthful enthusiasm. But I still felt affection for the young man who had picked up this book then and who, to open his mind to a new world and to become a better person, had read it so eagerly. I preferred that optimistic and still half-formed young man, who thought he could see everything, to the reader I’d become. So whenever I sat down to read the book, we were a crowd: my twenty-year-old self, my confidant Stendhal, his heroes, and me. I liked this crowd.