Hüzün

Today I met a woman from Istanbul. She came into the store and my colleague asked her where she's from—the accent and headscarf gave her away as a newcomer to these parts.  When she said, "Turkey," I turned around (butting into the conversation and interrupting the customer I was waiting on, who was fortunately very gracious about it) and said, "We're traveling there next spring!"  "Really?" she exclaimed, her face lighting up. "Where in Turkey are you going?" "Istanbul." "Oh, that's where I lived!  I miss it so much." So we exchanged names and phone numbers and she said she'd love to talk with us anytime as we make our plans for the trip.

Now I have a real person to add to the pile of books by my bedside.  She's been in the store before—I recognized her, I had just never asked her before where she's from.  I'm always afraid it will sound unwelcoming: "Where are you from?" i.e, "You're not from around here, obviously." Add that to my innate shyness and it's a question that I rarely ask anyone.  Hearing my colleague ask, however, and seeing how happy the woman was to talk about her former home, makes me realize it's probably not a rude question and would in fact most often be welcomed, and welcoming.  So I'll try to ask it more from now on.  We actually have quite a number of non-native Pittsfielders who come into the store, including a large contingent from Africa.  I don't know where in Africa because I've never asked.

Anyway, as I was saying, I have this pile of books by my bedside now to start giving me some background on Istanbul.  I like to read memoirs and fiction novels set in a place to get a feel for it beyond the facts and dates and useful phrases in history books and travel guides.  The history books and travel guides are helpful, too, and I'll be reading a pile of those as well.  But I started out with a book of collected writings from across the centuries, beginning as early as the 6th century, about some key places in Istanbul: A Traveller's Companion to Istanbul, edited by Laurence Kelly. As Kelly says in the Introduction, "the city's myths, prehistory, and recorded history span twenty-seven or twenty-eight centuries… The sheer weight of history to be summarized would take up the whole Introduction, and in practice duplicate the competent summaries to be found in all guide-books… In any event, this anthology's own extracts cover nearly all the major events in the city's history." The cumulative effect of centuries' worth of commentary on everything from the fall of Constantinople to the treatment of the women in the harem is mesmerizing. And the sources are often first-person accounts, giving the history an intimacy that I just love. One of my favorite tidbits comes from an early 17th-century writer, Robert Withers, regarding the harem:  "Now it is not lawful for any one to bring ought in unto them, with which they may comit the deeds of beastly uncleannesse; so that if they have a will to eate Cucumbers, Gourds, or such like meates, they are sent in unto them sliced, to deprive them of the meanes of playing the wantons; for, they being all young, lustie, and lascivious Wenches, and wanting the societie of Men (which would better instruct them) are doubtlesse of themselves inclined to that which is naught, and will be possest with unchast thoughts."  I'd guess bananas are out, too.

My next literary venture into Istanbul is Orhan Pamuk's memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City.  Pamuk is the author of the novel Snow, which I read last year and liked very much.  He has lived in Istanbul his whole life and is, in fact, back in the same apartment building now where he lived as a child. As he says, "Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations.  Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness.  My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view.  Istanbul's fate is my fate.  I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am."

One of Pamuk's main themes is hüzün, which he defines as a particular kind of melancholy that is "communal rather than private" which permeates Istanbul. He devotes an entire chapter to hüzün, trying to explain it to those of us who don't know it in our souls as all native Istanbullus do.  It has to do with the reality of living in the capital city of a fallen empire, in a place that was once the center of the world and is now almost forgotten. "The city into which I was born," says Pamuk, "was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history.  For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy.  I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own." He gives a 6-page list of examples or expressions of hüzün in Istanbul: "I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags… of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets… 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…. On cold winter mornings, when the sun suddenly falls on the Bosphorus and that faint vapor begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so dense you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its landscapes."

I am too young and my country is too young for me to have any understanding of hüzün in all its depths. But the beauty in melancholy I do understand. The softness. "Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter's day."