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.

The Thread of Time

This summer, I spent two days by the Aegean Sea with a close childhood friend I’d studied with through middle and high school, whom I hadn’t seen in years. It was surprising for both of us—as if we had jumped through time, still seventeen years old, watching two women on the cusp of turning forty as if from a dream. We marveled at how the years had passed, how far removed we were from our younger selves, yet how vividly those memories remained alive in our minds. We talked extensively about old memories and life itself. Since I sometimes read from my diaries to her, we laughed recalling some youthful dreams and secrets recorded there. The greatest dream born from being passionately devoted to literature in youth is the expectation that a romantic, epic life—like those in the books—awaits us. Yet, early youth often consists of long, desolate waiting; neither the great events we imagined arrive, nor does time seem eager to flow.

I have kept a diary for as long as I can remember. Life has never been something that simply flows for me, something I could passively be carried along by. From the moment I learned to write, I needed writing to make sense of my experiences. By writing down what happened each day and retelling it to myself, it felt as though I truly lived that day. One of the most magical aspects of journaling is the ability to access your younger self whenever you wish. On those pages, I am seven years old, arguing with my school bus friend; or laughing at humorous sketches from the show Olacak O Kadar. Then I grow older—friendships, loves, school, books, exams come and go. My writings become more abstract, capturing my search for meaning, books, films, and explorations of what love truly is. When I turned twenty, I wrote about the “last minutes of my teenage years,” pages stained with tears as I grasped the speed at which time moves. Did I record these moments because I was always so conscious of time, or did I become so curious about time because I wrote my life’s fragments into diaries? I do not know the answer.

A writer friend whose judgment I trust once observed that I often evoke the past in my writings. I looked back and saw he was right. But this was no unique trait of mine. When I began to reflect on this, I realized that I rarely stayed fully present even during the day; almost every step I took summoned memories from the past. It seems that every morning when I wake, I place the past like a crown upon my head and live in a constant state of recollection and flux. As I pondered this, Samuel Beckett’s reflections on Proust came to mind: we cannot escape yesterday, because just as yesterday deforms us, we also deform it; yesterday changes us and remains lodged within us as a dangerous fragment. Like the memories etched in my diaries, the past continually moves, renewing itself, recreating both itself and me with each passing day.

Amid these reflections, I learned that Marguerite Yourcenar translated Woolf’s The Waves into French, prompting me to revisit the book. My initial aim was to compare translations, but I soon lost myself in the text. The carefully woven language, the subtle nuances unique to English, drew me in completely. I had no choice but to focus wholly on the text itself. The Waves narrates the story of seven friends. The seventh, Percival, is only known through the thoughts of the others; he dies young. The chapters open with interludes depicting the waves and the changing light of the sun over the course of a day. Each character’s inner voice reveals more of their thoughts than events. On the surface, almost “nothing” seems to happen, yet the entire depth of existence is contained within. We track the friends from middle school into old age, bearing witness to life itself. The conversations are unlike ordinary daily talk; the characters do not easily take tangible shape in our minds, but the overarching themes of birth, friendship, growth, and death unfold vividly throughout the novel.

As I immersed myself in the text, I found myself repeatedly surprised. It has always been more significant to me not what happens, but how we perceive life, how we think about time and events—and in The Waves I delighted in finding a similar understanding. The novel flows through experience in the mind rather than through plot. Woolf created a garden where everything existed in near divine harmony, and I sat in a garden where flowers bloomed by chance, reading the book. Such moments may seem ordinary, but to me they are strikingly profound.

Moved by the text, I began to think deeper about the book. I wondered at what age Virginia Woolf wrote it: she was forty-nine. Her diaries and essays in Moments of Being mention The Waves and the thoughts behind it. This year I turn forty, and I find myself rolling within the finely woven literary fabric Woolf spun shortly before turning fifty—the full expression of her Virginia Woolf-ness. The text reminded me of tightly-knit textiles; Woolf selected every word with care, knitting strong stitches. According to Woolf, she wrote the novel not following a plot but according to rhythm. Nurdan Gürbilek’s commentary on Woolf’s fascination with weaving was no coincidence. I also learned that the roots of the words “textile” and “text” are the same.

The Waves offers profound insights into existence—not simply Woolf’s or mine, but a general understanding of being. When we read great books in youth, we may miss the wisdom conveyed through a lifetime of experience. Hearing Woolf’s genius at my age, I was affected differently. The characters respond to the present moment of flux only through a selfhood shaped by past contributions. Remembering and time are the essential raw materials in The Waves. Woolf expresses the conclusions she arrived at in Moments of Being through characters like Neville and Bernard, filtering them through a literary lens.

Among the most startling realizations during those two days with my childhood friend was this: the memories we carry need not be grand; while our shared memories include remarkable events, they were not recalled with the same vividness. The small, joyful moments—the two lovely days we spent together in high school, the brief, seemingly ordinary school memories—were as vital to our memory as great adventures. As we talked, we realized that even during times we thought we were waiting for life, life had been asserting itself upon us. Woolf was right.

Woolf recounts in her diaries how intensely she devoted all her resources to writing The Waves, struggling so much that she had no energy left for anything else at night. Countless academic readings have analyzed The Waves with Heideggerian, Buddhist, and even Beethoven-inspired structural parallels. This variety reveals the richness of the novel’s understanding of time and rhythm.

I also believe The Waves invites numerous interpretations. Woolf’s immense wisdom, the power of her language, and her complete devotion to her craft warrant profound respect. In Moments of Being, she explicitly explores memory, an epiphany for me. Some of our thoughts run parallel—like this passage, for example:

“I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea time, despite the day’s goodness, this goodness was wrapped in a soft fabric difficult to describe. This is always the case. Most of each day is not consciously lived. People walk, eat, see things, mind their chores: the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering food; cooking dinner; bookbinding… On a bad day, the percentage of not-being is higher. A true novelist can somehow convey both being and not-being. I think Jane Austen can do that, maybe Dickens and Tolstoy. But I have never been able to do both myself. I tried—in Night and Day and The Years. But for now I am putting the literary side aside.”

What Woolf succeeded in The Waves was precisely this. Using time’s thread, she wove a book from the same fabric as life itself. The ability to convey life’s flow and the passing of years in a written masterpiece. The author likens meaningful and meaningless moments—those when we are aware and unaware—to cotton threads. Yet, these fibers do not float independently; behind them lie strong patterns. The great writer tells us that the quest for meaning is precisely to discover that pattern. Transforming the seemingly insignificant events of daily life into literature was already at the heart of literary modernism. Mrs. Dalloway would simply buy the flowers herself—no more than that.

Last year, in an interview with Şavkar Altınel, I asked a question, and with his usual eloquence he replied: “Larkin writes in a letter to one of his lovers, ‘The passage of time and the approach and arrival of death seem to me the most unforgettable things about our lives.’ I don’t guess I need to say I entirely agree. What I cannot understand is why everyone isn’t constantly writing about this.”

Woolf does exactly that, capturing this most unforgettable aspect with magnificent literary skill. A passage in The Waves that I especially love reads:

“‘Why look,’ said Neville, ‘at the ticking clock on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. We age. But sitting here with you, just you, here in London, in this fire-lit room—you there, me here—this is everything. Yet when you come, everything changes. (…)

This morning when you arrived, cups and plates changed. Pushing aside the newspaper, I thought our shabby lives, unpleasant for their many faults, cannot be doubted to be clothed in grandeur; only under love’s gaze do they gain meaning.’”

In this passage, Woolf stitches a tiny but strong moment into the great unstoppable flow of time. Through Neville’s eyes, though the clock ticks inexorably, the true essence is the present moment—the intimate bond formed in a single room that can hold the entire passage of time. You and I sitting in a room, that’s everything. I am grateful to have lived enough to understand what this means when I read it.

Reflecting on these thoughts in my journal after my two days with my childhood friend, I realized Woolf was telling us that the moments we remember are moments of being, flowing alongside daily life. That’s why, listening to my favorite songs on my headphones while walking from Galata to Karaköy, enjoying the exuberance of music against the Istanbul skyline on a mild autumn morning, I can relive that moment with the same clarity twenty years later. Writing defines the relationship between moments of being and not-being; some moments exist only because they are recorded. Woolf said this too: one can be happy with ordinary moments and create masterpieces by writing them. Life consists of these moments, and understanding this changes how I live.

I write this on a hot August day by the Aegean Sea I have known for forty years, watching the waves. The sun, the sea, and the waves remain the same. What changes by spinning them is me. The waves break on the shore.

 

Kaynakça: 

Woolf Virginia, Dalgalar,  Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2016 (T. Cansunar, Çev.)

Woolf Virginia, V. (2022). Varolma anları 1: Bütün eserleri 8 (İ. Özdemir, Çev.). Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi. (Özgün eser: Moments of Being)

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited with an introduction and notes by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

kitap-lık, Sayı 232, Mart–Nisan 2024.

Gürbilek, Nurdan. Örme Biçimleri: Bir Ters Bir Düz Fragmanlar. Metis Yayınları, 2023.

Olson, Liesl M. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Cotton Wool of Daily Life.’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 42–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831894. Accessed 11 Sept. 2025.

 

Woolf, V. (1993). Les vagues (M. Yourcenar, Trans. & Pref.). Librairie Générale Française. (Original work published 1931)

Beckett, Samuel. Proust. Édith Fournier. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990. (Elektronik baskı: 2013).