Orhan Pamuk Says #7 "You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once."

Sitting in the carriage with the book in my hand... I felt a strange contentment and peace of mind, an easy feeling inside me, whose reason I understood only much later, as I thought and thought about it, ...I decided that the pleasure came from that book I was holding, from looking at the cover and remembering how Nigan, Turkan, and Sukran, one after the other, had read to me from it that day:  an Englishman lived for years alone on a desert island because his ship had sunk, no, not entirely alone, actually he had a servant....  I knew it wasn't this thought that filled me with peace, I knew it was something else.

I had before my eyes the road and the memory of this day, which was so lovely to contemplate.  But the thing that pleased me above all was the feeling that once back home, because of the book in my hand, I might be able to relive those delightfully confusing moments now past.

I would always tell myself so many years later: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so?



From Orhan Pamuk's second novel, Silent House, originally published in 1983 and just this year translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn.

You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book The Lay of the Land and highly recommend it, and the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. He punches you in the gullet all the time.

 (You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book and highly recommend the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. [1-The Sportswriter; 2-Independence Day] He punches you in the gullet all the time. The following are excerpts from The Lay  of the Land, this first one is from toward the end of the book.  It is November 2000, after the Gore vs. Bush presidential election.)



"When I'm turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation--generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate.  This will be the first such letter I've actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know--we all do). 

 It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don't steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or called ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no with for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any.
      


...I'll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake.  I will say to the President that it's one thing for me to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level--that life can't be escaped and must be faced entire.  But it's quite another thing for him to do, or his successor.  For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous.  Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they've worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept.  ...there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic."



[p. 466.]

Richard Ford

"Chances are, with the year I've had, I was headed there anyway....When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it--to have that chance before it's too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they're "feeling it," when the ball's as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that's all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level."

"More tears are falling.  I could laugh through them if I didn't have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest.  What is it I'm supposed to accept?  That I'm an asshole?  (I confess.)  That I have no heart?  (I don't confess.)  But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it?  What would be the hardest for others? 

"...and of course, the answer's plain, unless we're actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it's still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won't admit it, maybe can't.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

"...deep in my heart space a breaking is.  And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me.  'Oh-uhhh.'  The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales.  'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh. '  so long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by....'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh.'  Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in.  'Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.'  Yes, yes and yes. No more no's.  No more no's.  No more no's."

"As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning--to me. I will if I can."

[All excerpts above from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land]



Orhan Pamuk Says #6 Can't you sleep? Isn't it too soon to confess the truth? You are not allowed to think about what you did today or what you're going to do tomorrow.

 

 "You've just gone to bed. You're in familiar surroundings, nestling inside sheets and blankets that are steeped in your own smells and memories; your head has found that pocket of softness in the middle of your pillow; you're lying on your side, and as you curl your legs up against your stomach, your forehead tilts forward, and the cold side of the pillow cools your face: soon, very soon, you'll fall asleep and, in the darkness that engulfs you, you'll forget everything--everything.




Photo courtesy of Amanda Ruggeri

 

    

      "You'll forget the...unfinished work...those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes--in just a few minutes you'll forget them all.

 

     "...Waiting with  you in the darkness, or the half-light, are all those ordinary and oh-so-familiar wardrobes, chests of drawers, radiators, tables, trays, chairs, tightly shut curtains, discarded clothes, and cigarette packs--the matches are in the pocket of that jacket, and next to it is your handbag and your watch--all waiting, waiting.  ...You are ready.

     "You are ready.

     "But still you can't sleep."

 

 

     "If my memory, my powers of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams do not cave in from exhaustion in the course of my long travels, I'll keep on drifting through that gray land between wakefulness and sleep until my eyes light on a place I know...whatever it is, I'll go inside, and after opening every door and searching every room as if the house itself were the lost recesses of my own memory, I'll go into the last room, blow out the candle, stretch out on the bed, and, surrounded by strange and alien objects, fall asleep."

 

 

[Text excerpted from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. New York: Vintage International Books, 2006, pp.246-250]

[Photo credits: (1) Siena at Night, Amanda Ruggeri; (2) Orhan Pamuk, Innocence of Objects.]

 



"A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything." He was the "Master of human smiles and human moan, Passions that ask for bread and find a stone, Hopes hungered into madness..." (John Powys on Thomas Hardy) --John Cowper Powys Championship Page #8

(Having been a fan of Thomas Hardy's novels during and after college, I was doubly delighted when I read this particular chapter, sometime during the 1980s, of Powys' wonderful book Enjoyment of Literature.)

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys on Thomas Hardy...

 

Thomas Hardy in his garden

      "...in the midst of those who aim at creating a glow of sensuous well-being in their readers and of those who aim at distrubring their readers with frightfulness and disgust, the figure of Thomas Hardy stands out clear and distinct as one whose purpose was to capture the simple truth; and to present it, whatever the effect on his readers might be, with the patient taciturnity of the monotones of nature as they refuse to change one note of their grey neutrality under the prayers and imprecations of our troubled race."   

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

   

  "A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything; ...Hardy's good men are...a mixture of simplicity and sagacity, and they seldom, if ever, surprise us by explosions of morbid nerves or of imaginative weakness.  ....Loyalty, fidelity, simplicity, sagacity, disinterestedness, are the marks of a "good" Hardy character.  And it is the same with Hardy's good women.  Tess is certainly "a good woman," if ever there was one; and what a comfort to feel how the moral sense of the age has advanced since such a "wounded name" as Tess's needed the bosom of a great and daring genius to house it!"



     "What makes Hardy--with Shakespeare--the greatest of our pessimists is that his pessimism isn't a matter of personal nerves or personal misfortune but a matter of indignant sympathy with a suffering world..., the kind of suffering on which he concentrates, is not, though the physical enters also, the misery of hardship and destitution, so much as the emotional tragedies of the heart."

views of Thomas Hardy country in England

[Text from above excerpted from Powys, John Cowper.  Enjoyment of Literature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938, pp. 435-450.]