So It Goes

At Midlife, What's Your Zion?

FOR MANY OF US, turning 50 is an occasion for panic, dread, soul searching or some odd and unsettling shift of perspective. Before I reached that threshhold a few months ago, I was determined not to fall into this state and to let it pass as if it were any other birthday.

But I guess I'm no different than most. I surprised myself and spent a bit more time and energy than I expected thinking about turning 50. To be honest, I wasn't sure whether to consider it a time for a fresh start or for holding fast to the grooves I'd worn for myself, either by design or by the simple act of living (as John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.").

It turns out that someone who lived nearly a thousand years ago offered some profound perspective on this passage, which just goes to show that we moderns didn't invent introspection or the midlife crisis.

I'm speaking of Yehuda Halevi,a Jewish poet, philosopher and physician who lived in Spain from about 1070 or 1075 to 1141. Overlapping, and in some cases interacting with some of the other masters of Spain's Jewish literary tradition, Halevi was one of the leading lights in what many consider to be a Golden Age of Hebrew poetry. "Never again did it mean as much for an entire society as it had meant in Andalusia," writes Hillel Halkin, who has just produced a wonderful biography of Halevi published this year  by Nextbook. "And never again until the twentieth century did it shine as it had shone there." Indeed, some of Halevi's work and that of contemporaries such as Shmuel ha-Nagid, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Moshe ibn Ezra and Avraham ibn Ezra have long been part of the Jewish liturgical canon. Jews still recite some of their poetry as part of formal prayer.

The poetry speaks for itself, feeling as fresh and as immediate to a reader in 2010 as it may have in the 11th or 12th century (though people like me have the disadvantage of reading Halevi in translation, which, even at its best, loses the word play and rythms that gives verse its glimmer). Reading it, I have the same sensation I get looking at, say, a Vermeer painting, whose colors still leap off the canvas, even some four and a half centuries since the artist put them there, and whose subjects still draw you in.

During Halevi's lifetime, Muslims and Christians continously fought for and periodically swapped control of various regions of Spain. This prompted the poet and many other Jews of his time to migrate from one city where they suddenly faced persecution to another where they could live in relative, albeit temporary, peace.

But, even though he lived comfortably (such was the station of a physician, particularly one who treated rulers) and was revered inside and outside his Jewish community as a literary force, Halevi apparently never felt fully at home there. Nor, the record suggests, did he have any particular yearning for practicing medicine (unlike another major Jewish philosopher, Moshe ben Maimon, or Maimonides, who was born in Spain near the end of Halevi's life and who was as prolific a medical thinker as he was a religious one). He was, at heart, a poet.

He was also a Jew, whose writings spoke restively about life at the whim of Christian or Muslim leaders and romantically of Zion, the Holy Land, notably in a series of poems that later became known as shirey tsiyon or Songs of Zion. As he wrote in one of the most famous of these poems,

    My heart is in the East -- and I am at the edge of the West.
    How can I possibly taste what I eat? How could it please me?
    How can I keep my promise or ever fulfill my vow,
    When Zion is held by Edom and I am bound by Arabia's chains?
    I'd gladly leave behind me all the pleasures of Spain --
    If only I might see the dust and ruins of your Shrine.

    [This translation by Peter Cole from "The Dream Of the Poem" (2007)]

Edom, in this case, referred to the First Crusaders, who in 1099 had conquered Jerusalem, slaughtering masses of Muslims and Jews and barring their remnant communities from resettling there. The small community of Jews that remained in Palestine was weak and scattered, and Jewish pilgrimmage to Jerusalem, which was now difficult and dangerous, came nearly to a halt. “Besides having to put up with the hostility or mockery of its Christian inhabitants,” Halkin writes, “a Jewish pilgrim to the city would have found no Jewish home to stay in, no synaogue, and no kosher food.”

Still Halevi clung to his passion for Zion; indeed, today we consider him a proto-Zionist from whom others, centuries later, would draw inspiration to form the modern Zionist movement.

Halevi’s passion seemed only to intensify as he grew older and closer to death, as in this love poem for Jerusalem suggests, speaking of a queen banished from her home:

    O fair of view! World's joy! Great monarch's home!
    For you, from earth's far end, my spirit yearns.
    Compassion stirs in me when my mind turns
    To your lost cloister and its spendors' doom.
    Would that on an eagle's wings I flew to mix the water of my tears with your parched clay!
    Always I think of you -- and though your king's away,
    And snakes and scorpions scuttle where once grew
    Your balm of Gilead, your stones and earth
    Would taste, when kissed, like honey in my mouth.

At a certain point later in his life, Halevi made it known to his family and friends that he wanted to make that difficult pilgrimmage to Jerusalem. But for many years he put off the journey, yielding to the many responsibilities and security of his life in Spain, and perhaps the appeals of his friends and family who tried strongly to dissuade him from going.

But his impatience grew, and “sometime in his fifties... he wrote a poem about this,” Halkin writes. Even though, in his fifties, Halevi was far beyond midlife, he was going through what we could call a midlife crisis, and, Halkin writes, “he takes himself to task for clinging to material pleasures and social enjoyments in disregard of the duty to set out.” The poem describes his internal struggle -- do I stay or do I go? -- in the form of a tempestuous ocean journey, not unlike the actual one he would have to take to get to the Eastern Mediterranean.

    A man in your fifties -- and you still would be young?
    Soon your life will have flown like a bird from a branch!
    Yet you shirk the service of God, and crave the service of men,
    And run after the many, and shun the One
    From whom the multitudes of all things come,
    And laze about instead of setting out
    On your true way, and for a mess of pottage
    Sell your immortal part. Has not your soul had enough?

    ...Be as bold as a panther, swift as a deer!
    Fear not the open sea, though mountains of waves crest and crash,
    And hands shake like rags in a gale,
    And speechless ships’ carpenters quail,
    and crews leap to the task and in dismay stagger back,
    Trapped in an ocean with nowhere to flee
    While the sails flap and crack, and the deck creaks and groans,
    And the wind whips the water into haystack-high bales.

    ...[After a tumultuous trek] the waves subside; like flocks of sheep they graze upon the sea.
    The sun has set, departing by the stairs
    Up which ascends the night watch let by its silver-sworded captian.
    The heavens are an African spangled with gold, blue-black
    Within a frame of milky crystal. Stars roam the water,
    Flare and flicker there, outcasts far from home.
    The seaward-dipping sky, the night-clasped se, both polished bright,
    Are indistinguishable, two oceans cupled alike,
    Between which, surging with thanksgiving, lies a third, my heart.

As the poem suggests -- and as he spells out in even greater detail in his monumental philosophical work, The Kuzari -- Halevi overcame the fear and inertia keeping him from his true passion, though he had no illusion that the path ahead would be easy.

And, eventually, in 1140, somewhere between his early and mid-sixties, Halevi left Spain and set out for Palestine. Upon leaving, he wrote:

    Driven by longing
    for the living God
    to hasten to where his annointed ones dwelt,
    I had no time to kiss my firends or family
    a last farewell;
    no time to weep for the garden I grew,
    the trees watered and watched as they branched and did well;
    no time to think of the blossoms they bore.
    ...Forgotten are my synagogue
    the peace that was its study hall,
    my Sabbaths and their sweet delights,
    the splendor of my festivals
    I’ve left them all.
    Let others have the idol’s honors and be hailed.
    I’ve swapped my bedroom for dry brush,
    its safety for rough chaparral,
    the scents and subtle fragrances that cloyed my soul
    for thistles’ smells,
    and put away the mincing gait of landlubbers
    to hoist my sail and cross the sea
    until I reach the land that is
    the Lord’s foostool.

The postcript is that Judah Halevi stopped for eight or nine months in Egypt, where he was treated by the Jewish community there as a literary celebrity. They, too, tried to talk him out of going to Palestine, and the comforts with which they showered him could easily have dissuaded Halevi from continuing.

But in the spring of 1141, he set sail for the Holy Land. The record of what happened to him then went blank, though there is virtual certainty that Halevi died within only a few months. No one knows whether he made it to Jerusalem and fulfilled his ultimate dream of gazing upon its glory.

For most of us at midlife, Halevi’s example is a bit extreme -- giving it all up to chase a passion, knowing full well that hardship of that journey, especially for someone in the late hours of life. Most of us can’t, won’t or don’t need to make that sort of sacrifice. And, to some extent, for our own peace of mind, we need to put away dreams that are simply unattainable at a certain advanced age, if they ever were realistic. (In my case, for instance, I think it’s time to accept that I’ll never play in the NBA, as I once thought possible -- at least until I stopped growing at age 13 or so and never learned to go to my left.)

Yet it is Halevi’s passion itself that is instructive and inspiring, even for those of us who are not ready to alter our lives so radically. It is easy at midlife for one to think the tank is half empty. Halevi’s message is that it’s never too late to find your Zion -- your passion -- and to set out on a tough and scary passage to find it.

The question for us, then, at this point -- and I suppose any point -- of life is, what's your Zion? And what will it take for you to taste even a morsel of it?

Jeff

Except where noted, all translations above are by Hillel Halkin from his 2010 biography of Halevi.

So He Goes -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

IN MY VERY FIRST POSTING ON THIS BLOG nearly a year ago, I tried to make it clear that, while I got the name of this blog from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s book "Slaughterhouse Five," I don't consider myself a Vonnegut aficionado. But it seems only right that I would say something about him now that he just passed away.

I read a couple or three of his books, and I liked them. I'm not sure I was as inspired as many people my age were by them. Entertained, yes. But I didn't always get his messages. Not because, in retrospect, they were too subtle, but maybe because they were too overt and then mixed up with all the science fiction stuff that threw me off. It was great writing for sure, but not my bag.

"Slaughterhouse Five" was another matter, and maybe that's because it was so personal and so harrowing at the same time. How could one have lived through the firebombing of Dresden and then written such a tragic and comic account of it  as "Slaughterhouse Five."  The obituaries talk about how the experience "seared" Vonnegut's consciousness for the rest of his life, which had to be true enough. (I just wish the obit writers could have come up with a less trite phrase for such a moment.) The memory was, it seems, not only a tragic but also sublime.

In a 2002 interview with McSweeney's, the online literary site, Vonnegut was asked what memory he would choose if he told pick only a single memory from his entire life which will endlessly replay for him (you have to read the interview to understand the context of this seemingly silly question). He replied: 

"I think it would be the moment where I was doing everything right, where I was beyond criticism. It was back in World War II. It was snowing, but everything was black. The trucks were rolling in. I was surrounded by my buddies. And my rifle was between my knees, my helmet on my head. I was ready for anything. And I was right where I belonged. That would be the moment. It would have to be the moment."

Interesting quote from a guy with whom we tend to identify as an anti-war icon -- even as recently as the last few months when he continued his fierce assault on political leadership that took us into our current leadership. But, I understand: that quote isn't an expression of blood-thirsty aggression but of a moment of perfect harmony with himself and the people around him at a time of great need. It explains why people of my generation will never fully understand the experience he and many others like him went through. We can only salute it.

Which is another reason why I was so taken in by "Slaughterhouse Five," as I am by nearly any well-written book (particularly personal narrative) on wartime. I try to put myself in the shoes of the people there, even though I'm sure that I can't possibly imagine what they actually felt and saw. The Battle of the Bulge! The life of a POW! The bombing of Dresden! I can't comprehend.

As I wrote in my first posting, in "Slaughterhouse Five" Vonnegut used the phrase "So it goes" to describe a banal sense of numbness to tragedy. I suppose that was something one acquires in the face of so much death and destruction in a place like Dresden. Because I can't really relate to that and generally hoped to be a bit less cynical than that, I set out to use the phrase in a different sense. As I wrote: "I'm attracted to the phrase mostly because of the second word -- 'It' -- which in this case can stand for almost anything. This blog, wherever it goes, will be about that: almost anything."

That may or may not have been a good strategy as blogs go. The best ones, I think, stick to one or two topics and dig deeply. But I realized that's not me, and, as the song goes, I gotta be me. (So it goes.)

When I did a little cursory research on Vonnegut, I think that may be one thing he and I had in common. He had some consistent themes, but he was thematically all over the place. It worked for him, in part, I think because he took the chance, put his head down, wrote and got published (it helps to be witty and talented). He also wrote at a time when there were lots more outlets for fiction writers. There were many magazines that would take his stuff and that of lots of others like him, so he could make a living between his 14 novels and other projects. He didn't need any stinking blogs.

The other thing we had in common was that we're both from Indianapolis. His family goes back generations there and made a major imprint on the city. There are still Vonneguts in living there now.

So for me one of the most memorable passages of his writings was this one below from "Cat's Cradle." The main character, modeled closely on Kurt Vonnegut himself, is on a plane in, as I recall, some far-flung place, and he bumps into someone from Indiana.

"Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

"'My God," she said, 'are you a Hoosier?'

"I admitted I was.

"'I'm a Hoosier, too,' she crowed. 'Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.'

"'I'm not,' I said. 'I never knew anybody who was.'

"'Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I've been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.

"'That's reassuring.'

"'You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?'

"'No.'

"'He's a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo . . .'

"'Attaché,' said her husband.

"'He's a Hoosier,' said Hazel. 'And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia . . . '

"'A Hoosier?' I asked.

"Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too, And that man in Chile . . ."

"A Hoosier, too?"

"'You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn't made his mark,' she said.

"'The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier.'

"'And James Whitcomb Riley.'

"'Are you from Indiana, too?' I asked her husband.

"'Nope. I'm a Prairie Stater. Land of Lincoln, as they say.'

"'As far as that goes,' said Hazel triumphantly, 'Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County.'

"'Sure,' I said.

"'I don't know what it is about Hoosiers, said Hazel, 'but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed.'

"'That's true,' I said.

"She grasped me firmly by the arm. 'We Hoosiers got to stick together.'

"'Right.'

"'You call me 'Mom.'

"'What?'

"'Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom."'

"'Uh huh.'

"'Let me hear you say it,' she urged.

"'Mom?'

"She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel 'Mom' had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

"Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere."

I haven't lived in Indiana full time since I was 18, which doesn't make me a very loyal Hoosier. But I still get a kick out of that scene (which Vonnegut probably didn't make up). It sounds all too real. I guess I have a little false karass in me. Maybe that would disappoint Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. But that's the best tribute I can give him.

Jeff

Feeling Lucky: The Story of Valentino Achak Deng

DAVE EGGERS' NEW BOOK WHAT IS THE WHAT made me feel sadness, fear, awe, joy, pride and a whole range of other emotions for the lead character, Valentino Achak Deng, whom we follow from boyhood in his native Sudan into his late 20s in Atlanta, Georgia. When I finished with his story of countless brushes with death -- either his own or that of people around him who do not survive -- and of unimaginable deprivation, I could only feel one thing: lucky.

It sounds truly corny, but all through the reading of this 475-page book, I felt that the only difference between me and Valentino Achak Deng was the luck of where we born and the "tribe" of people into which we were born. He was born and grew up in Marial Bai, a small Dinka village in the southern part of Sudan. In the mid-1980s, when he was seven years old, Achak's typical agricultural community (though his father was a successful merchant there) was attacked by Arab Muslims from the north at the behest of the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Attacks like this were happening thoughout the south. Villages like Marial Bai were being burned to the ground, their adult males killed, women abducted and cattle and other goods looted. Boys like Achak who could would just run, and run, and run as far and as long as possible.

That's what Achak did, and he eventually joined thousands of other so-called "lost boys," who walked for months seeking shelter and relative safety in Ethiopia and later Kenya. Along the way, they were attacked by the Sudanese army, wild animals and other Sudanese villagers, who saw them as competition for scarce supplies of food. They would die of disease, starvation, exhaustion, drowning  dehydration or any number of other maladies. They were heavily recruited by the rebel armies, which treated them as fodder and would just as soon wear out their lives. They were completely alone and witnessed firsthand more horrors of the world the most of us will ever dream of.

Achak made it to refugee camps, first in Ethiopia and later in Kenya, and he spent a total of about a dozen years in them. I'm not giving anything away -- Eggers reveals this in the opening of the book -- to say that Achak makes it to the U.S. as a refugee, and the odyssey of his complicated and sometimes painful entry into this strange culture is rich and fascinating.

At every point in the book, Achak -- sometimes he goes by Valentino, by the way -- is forced to make difficult choices: life and death choices, existential choices, choices about loyalty to self and loyalty to nation and family, choices about whether to not trust others and his own instincts. Again, it is more than most of us have to face, and it's hard to believe that a person could make it through with his wits intact.

And, so it seems, he does. Valentino Achak Deng is a real person, even though What is the What, his autobiography, is written by someone else (Eggers) and is a novel, a fictional account. Don't worry. Strange as that sounds, it really works.

And, again, there is, it seems to me, no way for a Westerner to read this book without feeling lucky. When you read about young boys walking for days in the hot sun with almost nothing to drink or eat, you have to feel lucky and grateful for even the bounty of the contents of a vending machine, let alone of our typical grocery stores.

When you read of Achak's ten-year residence in the limbo of Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, a sort of no-man's land detention area, where he could have just as easily never left were it not for U.S. government officials who decided to bring several thousand Sudanese "lost boys" to our shores, you can you feel lucky to have been born a citizen of the U.S.

When you read of Achak catching a ride in the back of a pick-up, only to realize as it speeds off that he is knee deep in dismembered bodies, you realize how lucky you are to have merely petty worries.

When you read that, even in the most secure conditions of the refugee camp, Achak and tens of thousands of others lived in rooms built with tree branches and other random materials and would stand in lines for an hour or so every morning with jerry cans to fetch the day's water, it should almost shame you to walk into your relatively cavernous home, appointed with electricity, HVAC and plumbing -- let alone with the fine furnishings and electronic gadgets that many of us can't seem to live without these days.

When you read of his loneliness and desire to learn the fate of his family, you feel lucky to have yours nearby.

When you realize throughout the book that he has survived this trauma, you feel lucky to have a person of such a constitution as Valentino Achak Deng around.

This is not only a great book but a great life lesson, too.

Jeff

Another Jerk: What Will We Learn from Judith Regan?

I DON'T KNOW JUDITH REGAN PERSONALLY, so I'm certainly in no position to judge her character, or, as our President has claimed to have accomplished in his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, to look into her eyes and to know her true soul. (Bush sure go that one right, eh?)

The media accounts, which are all I have to go on, suggest that Regan may have uttered something in private that was anti-Semitic. At best, she said something that was garbled in the translation. At worst, she has problems with Jews. A story about her on National Public Radio revealed reports that, among other things, she once boasted about replacing the sacred parchments inside of her neighbors' mezuzahs, those small prayer holders Jews put on the doorposts of their homes, with torn dollar bills.

Whether all of this is true, I can't verify, and whether it suggests terribly warped mind or real animous for Jews, many of whom must surely be a big part of her personal and professional life, I really can't say. If it is true, obviously, she deserves all the condemnation that has rained down on her over the last few weeks.

But even if it's not, my question is this: what took the publishing world and the people around her so long to run her out of her powerful perch? By all accounts -- and there seems to be absolutely no disagreement about this -- she's a despicable human being, who treats everyone around her terribly. Indeed, she seems to be a legendary abuser. Writing in today's San Francisco Chronicle about how the "foul-mouthed" Regan changed publishing for the better, of all things, Steve Kettmann also reported that she burned through employees rapidly because of her offensive style. "Another former Regan Books editor told me that according to News Corp. financial statements, Judith went through 80 employees just in the last year -- including 18 personal assistants," Kettmann wrote.

What finally got her fired from her parent company, HarperCollins, was not this reputation for chewing up people and spitting them out or other infamous indiscretions, which she apparently did not deny or shrink from. It was, rather, bad publicity that went far beyond even bad taste. It was the news that the Regan imprint would publish the O.J. Simpson book "If I Did It." There was, as most people know from the the barrage of cable news coverage, a firestorm of controversy about the book, and the publishers withdrew it for sale. HarperCollins subsequently fired Regan in the aftermath.

Again, I am hardly privvy to what was behind that decision, but one must ask the question, why now? Regan's behavior had been outrageous and well known for years. So, too, many of her books, as Kettmann points out, exploited the sensational, even seamy aspects of American society and current events.

One, for example, was the Jose Canseco memoir, which many argued played fast and loose with the facts about steriod use in Major League Baseball (though Canseco himself courageously came clean and the book was a catalyst, one might argue, for a lot of progress in baseball on this issue since). Her other authors have included Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, professional wrestler Mick Foley, and porn star Jenna Jameson. Hardly America's literary heritage.

Kettmann says that this sort of roster has been a Regan's great contribution to the publishing world. "'I think publishing learned from her that you have to appeal to the masses,' said one former Regan Books editor. 'Enough of being too high-brow. She was the one who said yes to wrestling when everybody was turning their noses up at it. Bang, No. 1. She had an ear to the ground and it worked for a long time.'"

Maybe. I won't enter this high-brow vs. low-brow debate. Perhaps Regan did have a gift for this, and, say what you want about how degenerate this stuff is; people bought it in large quantities.

So as long as Regan's horses kept winning, her bad behavior and schlocky "literature" didn't matter. Not to the people above her who, it turns out, truly had the power to put her out of the business at any moment, or the people below her, who kept coming back for more -- like the acolytes of Miranda Priestly, the "Devil Wears Prada" character based on the notoriously abusive real-life editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour.

In all these cases, and the ones I mentioned in a much earlier posting on jerks about the famously undiplomatic diplomat John Bolton, there is an unfortunate game in which everyone ignores the most obvious personality flaws of the one in charge. There is a tacit acknowledgement that bad behavior counts for very little, or maybe even nothing, as long as the cash cow, whatever that is in an organization or industry, lives. As soon as the cow swoons and dies, the character flaws suddenly become apparent. People are shocked, shocked, to learn about them.

But the fact is that bad behavior matters, and it ought to be taken into account before it's much too late and before we find ourselves making excuses for overlooking it. We can blame the abuser, but the rest of us who allow him or her to act badly bear responsibility, too.

The sad thing is that Judith Regan will probably survive this episode just fine, and even do much better than she did before in some enterprise, whether it's publishing, her own talk show, movie producing, a line or make-up or who knows what. We have a way of forgiving famous people for their slip ups (except maybe O.J. and the Saddam Hussein), even when they don't undergo substantial character change.

It will be interesting to see if Regan changes, if she learns anything from this and puts her flaws behind her. But it will be much more interesting to see if the rest of us do, too.

Jeff

Building Worlds With Words

THE CURRENT ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER published the lecture Orhan Pamuk delivered as he received his Nobel Prize for Literature last week in Stockholm. It's such a remarkable essay that I'd like to commend it to others to read or, if you wish, watch on streaming video via the Nobel Web site.

There are a lot of luminous thoughts in it about the role of literature and writers in the world, and I'll include a few excerpts of some of them below. But these great ideas decoupled from Pamuk's narrative really don't do him or the lecture much justice. In fact, they make it sound much more abstract than it really is. So try to read the whole text. But here are a few pearls:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words.
**
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I understand it, too.
**
The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build.
**
I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. [Notably, Pamuk himself was forced to flee his native Turkey for several years after he spoke openly about the Armenian Genocide at the hands of his countrymen in 1915. For that, his government was prepared to try him for insulting Turkey and Turkishness. The charges were later dropped.]  But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.
**
Turkey is often referred to as having a foot in both the East and West, and here Pamuk speaks from that vantage point in a way that people on both sides of the divide might do well to hear. He writes: We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that lead them to commit stupid acts. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
**
The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Jeff
(Photo above: Hans Mehlin. Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2006)