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.
