Fata Morgana

When I was a child, I was always very bored; I was an only child. At home, alone, not knowing what to do — a bit of Sesame Street, a bit of the games I made up for myself… I remember constantly counting the hours. Then something happened in my life, something tremendous happened. I learned how to read. The word was “ılık” (lukewarm), with capital I and lowercase l side by side — I couldn’t read it properly, so I ran to my mother to ask. She said, “It says ılık — capital I and lowercase l look almost the same, that’s why you can’t read it.” I learned to read, and my whole life changed.

“She reads even scraps of newspaper she finds on the ground; we can’t provide enough books for her,” said my parents with the pride that later turned into deep concern — the pride of parents whose child reads too much. “She’s always reading books, doesn’t want to leave the house…” My huge glasses, my preference for books over playing outside — now that I am a mother myself, I understand better why my parents were worried. A parent is terrified that their child might live an incomplete life for any reason.

I didn’t know then that the books I read in childhood would become the main component of my childhood memories — that, years later, I would feel an instant warmth, as if we had played together for years in the same street, with people who had read the same books as I had; that my love of reading would shape my life, and that even if I wouldn’t become a writer as I dreamed in primary school, I would become a lawyer — that is, I would earn my living through reading.

I was only having adventures from one book to another, and I dreamed that when I grew up, my life would be as big, as fun, and as full of adventure as those in the books. In Enid Blyton’s Naughtiest Girl series, which, for some reason, had been translated into Turkish from German so the characters had German names, I read about the boarding school adventures of a group of girls. Every time they returned to school, the headmistress gave a speech that I read with the same excitement each time, even though it was almost identical in every volume — with the admiration of Dolly, who adored the headmistress. I would warm up with Uncle Fedor’s home sun, befriend the cat Miço, and laugh out loud at Muzaffer İzgü, whom I considered my honorary grandfather, when I read that even grandmothers could join the army.

My childhood bore the mark of a boredom that little bookworms know very well: the night is late, bedtime has long passed, but the bedside lamp is still on. Slow footsteps can be heard from the hallway, then the door opens: “Come on now, time for sleep, look how late it is.” But that child still cannot sleep — there is too much to think about. That was the foundation of my lifelong night-owl habit. This summer, when I became an accomplice to my friend’s son who could secretly read thanks to the light of his Kindle, the child inside me rejoiced.

Even at this age, there are still many things about books that surprise me. But perhaps the most astonishing is the realization that no matter how full of diverse experiences a life may be, it remains incomplete without writing, books, and literature. There are many forms of reading, and making sense of life through literature is one of them. Literature is, in a way, when great writers tell a small child with no life experience yet: “This is what life is like, this is how love feels, that cloud-like emotion you’re feeling has a name.” It’s a kind of “user manual for life.”

I also went through a brief youth phase where I thought I was missing out on life because I listened too much and buried myself in books — a period when I swore off novels, believing that focusing only on living was a better way to live. What folly. Now I know very well that a life worth living, and all the experiences within it, only become truly lived for me when I can make sense of them through literature.

Actually, before I started writing this essay, I wanted to write a piece of fiction that could describe what I experience when I read. But then something happened to me — something that often happens to people who love literature and try to write. The things I wrote turned into a terrible text before my eyes. When I tried to put into words the act of reading, which I find the most magnificent thing in life, what came out resembled delirium — ugly sentences. What I wrote was so bad, so ordinary that I felt like crying.

Lately, after reading Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, I’ve been feeling that since I was so deeply affected by the book, whatever I read afterward would fail to impress me. So, to continue reading something whose beauty could not be questioned, I decided to read Anna Karenina. There is a moment in childhood when cartoons stop being interesting; one still tries to watch them, but something has gone flat — we have grown up. The animated world we couldn’t take our eyes off has lost its third dimension and turned into flat lines. The period when music and books lost their overwhelming effect on me — when I stopped falling in love with fictional characters and began to read books merely as books — that’s what I consider the true marker of my passage into adulthood, rather than any particular year.

The moment I realized that I shared my peculiar passion for reading novels — which was usually considered strange, which people feared might cause me to live an incomplete life, and which I used to hide in my early youth to make friends and not be excluded — with Orhan Pamuk was a turning point for me. It made me understand that this was not a personal oddity but rather the privilege of being able to take such pleasure from life. I couldn’t sleep out of joy after reading The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, because it taught me this.

I wanted to transfer what I felt while waiting for the Anna Karenina section described in that book into fiction — to write a story showing how daily life flows while we read, how I balance working and reading novels whenever I can, what happens in our minds when we read. I’ve finally reached the red-handbag scene in Anna Karenina. I’m excited now…  How beautifully he described the experience of reading an English novel — how the words gradually become clear. I’m glad I read this at this age. Vronsky fell in love with Anna at first sight — things I would have swooned over if I’d read it in college. I said what I wrote resembled delirium.

While reading this brick-like book, something frightening happened that had never happened to me before: for the first time in my life, my eyes got tired from reading. I can already see how I’ll describe the moment I entered middle age: I had reached the age when my eyes got tired while reading novels.

Reading Ada or Ardor, which led me to Anna Karenina, feels like falling through a rabbit hole like Alice — falling at great speed, but examining the fascinating objects along the way. Still, I must not forget that I am in Nabokov’s universe — Nabokov, the absolute master of his own realm, who holds the power to control how we, as readers, perceive each object.

In Ada or Ardor, one sentence in the protagonist Van’s notes caught my attention: “Monsieur Proust’s mauve shades.” When I typed it into a search engine, I found countless articles about the connections between Nabokov and Proust, and I was filled with infinite joy.

In high school, during those years when no one cared, when instead of reading poems we were being trained like racehorses for the university exams, I had felt in paradise during French literature class.

“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heur,” our teacher Madame Sanchez was reading aloud. “This,” she said, “is a very important sentence in French literature.” A boy deeply attached to his mother, unable to sleep unless she came to kiss him goodnight every night. I was always someone who learned by listening carefully in class — and after all these years, Sanchez’s explanations still echo in my ears. “Madeleines,” she said, and then she read that magical passage aloud.

At that time, I was seventeen, but since fifteen — when, jumping up and down on the stairs of a movie theater with my friends, I suddenly, with great terror, felt and grasped that this bouncing energy was a privilege granted to us only because we were fifteen, that it would vanish as I aged — since then, I have looked at the passage of time with melancholy, crying on every birthday instead of rejoicing.

The effect of a young person who has become aware of time encountering Proust is like an avalanche.

I had kept the notes I took during Proust’s class; every time I look at my notes on In Search of Lost Time, I find myself back in my high school years.

There is a quote from Proust in my notes: “Real life (…) is literature.” (Later I would find out that the full version of the quote is this: “Real life, finally discovered and clarified, the only life therefore fully lived, is literature.”)

Let’s call these the meaningful notes of a young girl who was afraid of living incompletely because of literature.

After Sanchez’s class, I wanted to run to the library and borrow the books. The librarian tried to chase me away: “These are books old people read in France — go out and have fun. What business do you have with these books?” Everyone in my life, even the librarian, tried to protect me from books, wanting me to go live a “real” life.

And I did live it — I learned languages, traveled the world. At twenty-one, I traveled Rome all by myself.

The most vivid memories from that trip are of the bookstore I visited — where I picked up a book because it had my favorite photograph on the cover, and it turned out to be Nazım Hikmet’s Love Poems in Italian — and the excitement I felt standing before the sign marking the spot where Dante entered Rome.

Which one is the real life?

Or I “really” passed the university entrance exam, moved from Izmir to Istanbul. My home was in Nişantaşı where Pamuk also lived. Having never seen Teşvikiye before, I compared the streets I was now walking with the imaginary Nişantaşı I had formed in my mind while reading The Black Book in high school, whose cover I had pasted into my diary.

Was that ornate corner shop Alaeddin’s grocery like described in the book? Did it actually exist? Orhan Pamuk lives right there, in the apartment across from the mosque (I can’t help making this joke) — I’m sure of it. But in fact, none of this matters — it takes time to understand that.

The experiences of a university student living in Istanbul, or even Orhan Pamuk himself, are not more “real,” not more valuable in the history of humanity than the young writer Orhan Pamuk appearing at Sibel and Kemal’s engagement in The Museum of Innocence.

It is The Black Book’s very existence that gives meaning to your walks in Istanbul.

Cemal whispers in our ear, “Don’t forget, our master, our guide, is Scheherazade” — that’s why Proust, too, cannot forget.

Marcel writes, “As I wandered through winding, dark streets, losing my way, I thought of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, seeking adventure in the remote quarters of Baghdad.” And as you walk through the streets of Istanbul, you keep thinking of Galip (The Black Book's protagonist), who was inspired by Marcel thinking of Harun al-Rashid; of Kinbote, who in Pale Fire claims that Marcel’s lover has traits borrowed from Vronsky; of Vronsky himself, who loves like Werther.

Outsiders will see only a young woman walking down a street, but you will know that you are taking a winding stroll through the history of literature.

If I wanted to complicate things even further, I could talk about the magnificent astonishment I felt when I realized that the poem mentioned in Orhan Pamuk’s essay on Anna Karenina — the one Ka wrote under the influence of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan — was in fact The Dream of Queen Victoria by Şavkar Altınel. But I won’t.

Let’s just say that, once again, we bow to the power of writers — the novelist, in these days when Alaeddin’s shop has changed hands and the city is being stripped of its memory, remains the only being capable of resisting all this destruction and representing Istanbul as a whole.

Thank goodness literature exists.

It is truly thanks to books that I live this life fully, to the fullest.

The Glass Essay

 

Sezen Ergen B.

‘You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? What right—answer me—for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?’

When I first read these lines, I was probably about twenty or twenty-one years old. I was at that age completely captivated by the absolute power of novels. I knew that to free myself from this influence, I would have to stop reading novels—but I couldn’t manage it yet. When the novel ended, Heathcliff easily took first place among the fictional characters I was in love with. He is someone not everyone can love easily. Even Terry Eagleton, almost twenty years after I read the novel, would accuse him of bullying and cruelty—but he would never understand him. Heathcliff is not like that; he has a hidden heart of gold, visible only with Cathy and me; and the more you read, the more you want to heal his wounds and mend him. I write the above passage in my diary, and even now, I know both its English and Turkish versions by heart.

“Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?” After Cathy’s death, Heathcliff tries to remain strong at first, but then he cannot bear it and cries like a wild beast for his love, calling for Cathy’s spirit to return. I find myself unsure whether I identify more with Cathy or with Heathcliff. Then, I bury myself in law books, abandoning living love through novels and blending into real life. I learn to read novels without identifying myself with the characters. Years follow years; I will try to distance myself from literature, or at least I think I can. But it cannot be done.

When a writing idea comes to mind, life seems to shower the person with serendipitous flowers. While contemplating this essay, I come across a post shared by a writer friend; she shared words by the famous Turkish poet Gülten Akın who was also a lawyer. She says: “I have a nature full of love, fed by dreams and images. I have always lived in ecstasy. We were taught to be silent, calm, not to express enthusiasm—especially people my age, especially women. A tiny woman full of love and passion, yet trying to be balanced, consistent, and orderly, often succeeding. That’s continuous tension right there. I had to write poetry or paint or do music; among these, poetry fit best into my heavy political life.”

On the table, there is a frame containing a painting I made, and right beside it, my first published poem. There are contracts waiting for me to review them on the table as well. I hear the washing machine finish, but I can’t rise. It feels as if I am sitting side by side with Gülten Akın, speaking her words; her serene smile known only from photographs. I have an app on my phone, an audiobook app. I still haven’t grown accustomed to listening to books, but there are e-books too. A few weeks ago, I came across a book by Anne Carson titled Eros the Bittersweet, an Essay. The book opens by discussing my beloved Sappho, and I immediately sense I will like it. 

Anne Carson, the author, is an academic, so naturally, I expect to read an academic analysis of Sappho. But I quickly realize I am mistaken. The book credits the epithet “bittersweet” to the god of love, Eros, as being first applied by Sappho, adding that no one who has ever been in love will dispute her on this. Thus, I understand the book will not remain strictly academic, which further draws me in.

Anne Carson continues elucidating Sappho’s fragments. She explains, for example, that the fragment beginning with “If you ask me, an equal to the gods, a wife sitting opposite you, the man” is actually about jealousy; I reread the pages several times to absorb this. While reading, I encounter passages so beautiful and moving that my eyes fill with tears. Through Sappho, Anne Carson speaks about life in ways I have never heard before. The passion described by Gülten Akın is present here too, visible as I move along the lines. Sappho, the essay—these are merely pretexts. In a text disguised as academic, I wasn’t expecting to read such lines: “Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. Love does not happen without the loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. ”

Anne Carson was not yet a poet when she wrote this book; she was still an academic. As I read in a later critique, she will transform from an “ugly duckling” essayist into a swan poet.

“Sebald, an expert in comparative literature, suddenly began to produce fictional works after turning fifty. This moment is one of the most important parts of the halo and legend surrounding the author. What happened that critical essays stopped being enough?” Carson strikes me like lightning; she also talks about our passion for letters and handwriting. The book ends, but I cannot get enough of Carson and immediately search out her other works. Anne Carson’s books are filled with layers of intertextual references. Cem İleri’s question about Sebald can be asked for Anne Carson too: what happened that essays no longer sufficed? Seeking an answer, I explore her layered writing style where essay and poetry intertwine. Writers who transcend genres and overflow their boundaries always fascinate me.

“Sebald’s text depicts a place—a place that reaches far into the past where archaeological ruins, debris, and traces from different eras pile up one on another, feeling the passage of time in its body. Upon all that a new, contemporary structure is built,” says Cem İleri about Sebald’s text. Anne Carson is exactly like that; she constructs the most modern poems imaginable on top of Sappho and all the ancient Greek texts she expertly studies.

As I dwell on these thoughts, the dryer finishes. I get up, fold the laundry, and sing loudly along with the music in my ears. Enjoying books nourished by intertextuality is a process; the accumulation of what we read perhaps requires that we grow a little older—this is what I think. Of course, there are authors who achieve remarkable works focusing purely on the stories they tell; one need not master the entire history of literature to love a book. I am reminded of a childhood movie, Hook, starring Robin Williams. In the film, Peter Pan has grown up, become a lawyer, and is consumed by work, never letting go of his phone. — For some reason, all fictional protagonists who kill imagination end up lawyers — Eventually, we learn he is indeed Peter Pan. In one scene, when he finally remembers how to use his imagination, he begins to actually see the imaginary delicious dishes laid out amid empty plates. Recognizing intertextual links is a bit like this. Each book we read adds new wings and portals to the imaginary castles. I fold the laundry and put it away; I’ve already reviewed the contracts. I have serious business—I must be balanced, consistent, and orderly. Yet, as the French say of dreamers, I want to build castles in Spain.

One of Anne Carson’s most famous poems is The Glass Essay, translated into Turkish as Cam Deneme, though it is composed in poetry form. At the opening lines, I hesitate; it is a poem of separation, and the man she parted from is named Law—is it an allusion to the law profession, I am thinking. I continue eagerly. What I thought was simply a poem about a breakup is also a layered portrayal of the woman in the poem. Another layer is the essay part where Anne Carson examines Emily Brontë’s life. In one verse, three silent figures sit at a table: Anne Carson, her mother, and Emily Brontë. The poet imagines this scene; I imagine myself sitting there as well—alongside Gülten Akın. The woman in the poem tries to cope with the breakup beside her mother. Then I read these lines:

“But early this morning while mother slept

and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights

where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing

Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,

.”

Heathcliff is back after all these years, testing me. Eros is in action. The moment I fully grasp what she is doing, I fall headlong, wildly, and deeply in love with Anne Carson’s writing. Carson already said it herself; Eros does not only exist between lovers but for every passion we hold. We can fall in love with poems, letters, words. Literature breathes life through Anne Carson, unlike Annie Ernaux, who lives to document life. Ernaux is mostly interested in telling a story; Anne Carson is not. She sacrifices herself, her poetry, and her texts to create an intertextual, multifaceted world. What matters most to her is not the story but this very intertextuality that has enchanted both of us. Carson’s writing and her autobiographical, although she insists it is not, poem-novel The Beauty of the Husband (translated into Turkish), brims with intertextuality. She cannot be confined by literary genres because she discusses ancient works and authors and thus must write essays. But from her very first book, the passionate woman described by Gülten Akın, who defies academia, is present—and Carson can express herself fully only through poetry.

In reply to Gülten Akın’s “If you peel the shell, the wound deepens,” Anne Carson writes:

“A wound gives off its own light 

surgeons say. 

If all the lamps in the house were turned out

you could dress this wound

by what shines from it.”

At the end of The Glass Essay, she transforms her body—and ours—into a conduit.

To convey the grandeur that books create, Anne Carson bares herself in her poem; she recounts how helplessly she stripped off her clothes beside the man she parted from, how she remained completely naked and humiliated just to be with him again. What she ultimately wants to show is how Emily Brontë’s life’s voids reflect in Heathcliff. A person in love does what? They think about their beloved day and night, unable to focus elsewhere, seeing them everywhere.

“For some women, love is
like a dreamless, carefree sleep,
like a fearless slumber.-Gülten Akın”

I lie awake, endlessly thinking of Anne Carson and her writings. In a talk, she refers to Descartes: “The original of ‘Cogito ergo sum’ is ‘Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum.’ Doubt is always forgotten, never remembered.” That is, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. Because I am in love, I repeat the phrase like a mantra for days: Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum.

One evening, we go to a dinner with friends. It is a newly opened Greek restaurant in Vienna. As I step forward to wash my hands, I see a phrase written on the wall among others: Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. Gülten Akın, I, and Anne Carson, two lawyers and an academic, sit down together and drink uzo.

Something Useful

Do you know the story of “forty gold coins, forty strokes”? They bring before Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent a man who can pass a thread through a needle from forty meters away. Astonished by this talent, the sultan orders that the man be given forty gold coins, and then be struck forty times. When asked why, he explains that he rewarded him for his skill but punished him for wasting his time on such frivolous tasks. I often remember this story when I’m engaged in references and intertextual connections. I enjoy chasing clues that may mean nothing to anyone else but me. I try to write in order to show the magnificent landscapes that my readings create in my inner world. “Put that book down and focus on your work” is something every book lover hears at some point in their life. But we, the literature lovers who do focus on our work, are reading the works of exactly those who resist at that point—who do not put the book down, who understand that these “frivolous” things are more important than any other work, and who shape their lives accordingly. 

About ten years ago, I tried an adrenaline sport for the first time. I jumped from a plane at 4,000 meters with a parachute. The freefall was truly fun and thrilling, but that was about it. I didn’t find the meaning of life in the spike of adrenaline, nor did I feel an urge to try something like that again. The activity that excites me most looks very boring from the outside. How is it that I can feel greater excitement sitting in a chair than from jumping out of a plane? I’ve been asking myself this for a while—no matter where I travel or how thrilling my activities are, why does my heart beat fastest when I see the connections between books and texts? I guess it’s because these connections form something akin to the secret of life—and because humanity has achieved such a magnificent accumulation, a structure that transcends boundaries and time. Books create a complete world of meaning for me, and that’s why I get so excited. And it’s an infinite sea.

In the search for meaning, the more you read, the deeper the layers become, and the harder it gets to share such meticulous interests with others. We have to think deeply about how to convey in writing what we have arrived at—what part of our life we should use to express what a book made us feel. When I write, am I trying to share the inner world that began with fairy tales, continued with cartoons, and was eventually entrusted to books? I once saw the impossibility of this in a film. In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the protagonist’s girlfriend understands every reference he makes; they constantly finish each other’s sentences. In the end, it turns out that such perfect understanding could only exist inside the character’s head—he had imagined his girlfriend in a schizophrenic way. The film is essentially telling us that the world you create from artworks is something you wander alone with in a barren desert. And yet, this seemingly “empty” hope is such a beautiful dream that it appears in many films and books. We want the person before us to grasp the world of meaning we’ve painstakingly gathered from books, poems, films, and songs.

In The Dreamers, the characters would suddenly start acting out some random film scene and then ask the other in the room, “Which film?” In another favorite of mine, What Is Loneliness Like, Semih Gümüş uses similar games—creating his text with allusions and hints. Most great writers, in fact, use the games and memories the past has formed in their worlds to create new universes. Armed with maps and keys of old works, we try to unlock meaning one lock at a time. Fake quotations and icy passages of pure fiction only make sense if the reader is willing to play along to understand the universe. One thing I had to realize when I started writing is that something absolutely clear to me may not appear equally clear to others. Not everyone who hears the word “Aleph” will instantly think, “I closed my eyes, I opened my eyes, and I saw the Aleph.”

A couple of years ago, when I first read Pale Fire, I thought I’d never dare to write again. How could one write anything after works like that? But when I later discovered how much Pale Fire was influenced by Eugene Onegin, I was somewhat relieved. Before reading Nabokov’s poem on the subject and looking at his translation, I had thought Pale Fire was pure creative genius—something that sprang from Nabokov just as Athena sprang fully armed from Zeus’s head. Of course, it wasn’t so. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me to research the sources of this creativity. Just as The Disconnected was influenced by Pale Fire, Nabokov was deeply influenced by Pushkin’s verse-form Onegin. Kinbote closely resembles Nabokov in his habit of writing volumes of commentary on Pushkin.

In the Turkish translation of Onegin by Sabri Gürses, I saw the lines:

“A sickness whose cause long ago

Should have been inquired into and found,

Something like the English spleen,

In short: Russian melancholy.”

The phrase “Russian melancholy” fascinated me. I wondered what the original Russian term was, which word had been translated this way. In the English translation, they had rendered it with the word “clime,” but that didn’t satisfy me. I eventually found out that in Russian there’s the word “khandra,” almost the exact equivalent of our melancholy. I found countless articles and essays about khandra, but I had to stop reading due to work obligations. Nabokov had many qualities making him a great writer, but we shouldn’t overlook his slight mad courage, his curiosity to chase butterflies, his indifference to surroundings, and his audacity to engage in “frivolous” pursuits. When few understood Pushkin, Nabokov turned into Kinbote by writing volume upon volume of commentary on Onegin. Nothing happens without cause.

So in this era when life speeds up, when politics make it impossible to breathe, when wars and climate crises rage—should we bother with Russian melancholy? I think the answer is both yes and no. Wittgenstein didn’t set philosophy aside while at the front; Ulysses was written while the Spanish flu and World War I were ongoing. For those who believe in it, literature is a survival mechanism—it makes this world a little more bearable. I have always thought that without art and literature, humanity could never recover from its disasters. For those who find the meaning of life in literature and tie their existence to these seemingly absurd things, engaging with them is absolutely necessary. A life lived without meaning has been wasted.

But what about life’s other obligations? Of course, they exist. In the concrete conditions of life outside the literary world, how much space can we really give to Pushkin? Is chasing after these abstract connections that have almost no counterpart in my external world really equivalent to threading a needle from forty meters away? This theme often appears in my writing, and I can’t help thinking about it over and over, because much of my time is spent in this duality. I also know I am not alone. Our literary history is full of civil servants hiding their love of literature from colleagues, doctors dreaming of writing novels, bankers working as translators, engineers, lawyers who are also writers and poets. In one of his essays, Armağan Ekici, a banker who translated Ulysses to Turkish, wrote: “Sometimes close friends ask me (no, not about Joyce) ‘is this we’re doing madness?’ I’ve always given the same answer: ‘Let it be madness—what good have the sane ever done for us?’ Yes, friends, just look—the world built according to the ‘sane’ is plain to see. (Remember Beckett’s beloved ‘The World and the Trousers’ joke.) Let the sane read what they want; much beauty in life comes from someone’s madness.”

I have done things that required courage before—moving alone to countries whose language I didn’t speak, even jumping from that airplane as I mentioned. Yet what impresses me most is that a person can devote their life to the things they are passionate about, mustering all their courage to follow that passion. I’m not that brave yet. In the film Something Useful, Leyla, who is both a poet and a lawyer, is asked why she practices law. She answers, “I wanted to do something useful.” And I, for my part, am following khandra in the footsteps of Nabokov and Pushkin—for the sake of doing something useful.