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.