Pamuk’s Istanbul
Excerpts from Chapter 10
for Enjoyment
Huzun: a feeling of deep spiritual loss
To the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish we feel because
we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do
enough for Allah in this world. A true Sufis follower would
take no interest in worldly concerns like death, let alone
goods or possessions; he suffers from grief, emptiness, and
inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah,
because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough.
Moreover, it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that
causes him distress. It is the failure to experience huzun
that leads him to feel it; he suffers because he has not
suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to its
conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold huzun in
high esteem. (90—91)
Cemaat: community of believers
The central preoccupation, as with all classic
Islamic thinkers, was the cemaat, or
community of believers. (92)
Now we begin to understand huzun not as the
melancholy of a solitary person but the black
mood shared by millions of people together.
What I am trying to explain is the huzun of an
entire city: of Istanbul. (92)
This feeling that is unique to Istanbul
and that binds its people together
But what I am trying to describe now is not
the melancholy of Istanbul but the huzun in
which we see ourselves reflected, the huzun
we absorb with pride and share as a
community. To feel this huzun is to see the
scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city
itself becomes the very illustration, the very
essence, of huzun. (94)
The huzun is so dense
you can almost touch it
These are nothing like the remains of great empires to be
seen in western cities, preserved like museums of history
and proudly displayed. The people of Istanbul simply carry
on with their lives amid the ruins. Many western writers
and travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more
sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders
that the present city is so poor and confused that it can
never again dream of rising to its formerly heights of
wealth, power, and culture. It is no more possible to take
pride in these neglected buildings, which dirt, dust, and
mud have blended into their surroundings, than it is to
rejoice in the beautiful old wooden houses that as a child I
watched burn down one by one. (101)
Huzun by choice
Istanbul does not carry its huzun as “an illness
for which there is a cure” or “an unbidden
pain from which we need to be delivered”: It
carries its huzun by choice. And so it finds its
way back to the melancholy of Burton, who
held that “All other pleasures are empty./
None are as sweet as melancholy”; echoing its
self-denigrating wit, it dares to boast of its
importance in Istanbul life. (103—104)
An ache that finally saves our souls
and also give them depth
The screen he projects over life is painful because
life itself is painful. So it is, also for the residents
of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty
and depression. Imbued still with the honor
accorded it in Sufi literature, huzun gives their
resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains
their choice to embrace failure, indecision,
defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with
such pride, suggesting that huzun is not the
outcome of life’s worries and great losses but
their principal cause. (continue to next slide…)
So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of
my childhood and youth, and also for many of
my real-life heroes during the same period:
They all gave the impression that because of
this huzun they’d been carrying around in
their hearts since birth they could not appear
desirous in the face of money, success, or the
women they loved. Huzun does not just
paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also
gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.
(103—104)
Feels together and affirms as one
The huzun of Istanbul suggests nothing of an individual standing
against society; on the contrary, it suggests an erosion of the will to
stand against the values and mores of the community and
encourages us to be content with little, honoring the virtues of
harmony, uniformity, humility. Huzun teaches endurance in times of
poverty and deprivation; it also encourages us to read life and the
history of the city in reverse. It allows the people of Istanbul to
think of defeat and poverty not as a historical end point but as an
honorable beginning, fixed long before they were born. So the
honor we derive from it can be rather misleading. But it does
suggest that Istanbul does not bear its huzun as an incurable illness
that has spread throughout the city, as an immutable poverty to be
endured like grief, or even as an awkward and perplexing failure to
be viewed and judged in black and white; it bear its huzun with
honor. (104—105)