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.