Read Online A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar - Free Book Online
Authors: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
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came to mind: “It’s ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here in this dusty shop from whose walls hung handmade tricot stockings ... In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, arcane insights of tradition, in an arrangement eternally alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over book rests or chairs, and on the floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay entombed. The Orient, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave. Beside these books, in open hawker’s cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in new contexts and climes: pulp novels with illustrated covers, textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if the detritus of the mind of mankind had been hastily exposed in this market, books mixed and intermingled, texts on reading fortunes in coffee grounds alongside classicist Mommsen’s vision of Rome, remnants of Payot editions, Karakin Deveciyan Efendi’s treatise on fish and ichthyology, as well as subjects like veterinary medicine, modern chemistry, and the techniques of geomancy.
Taken as a whole, it constituted a bizarre accretion that appeared simply to be the result of intellectual indigestion. Mümtaz realized that this omnium gatherum had been engaged in a hundred-year struggle and a continuous sloughing of skin.
An entire society grew despondent, strove, and suffered through anomie and birth pangs for a century so that digests of detective novels and these Jules Vernes might replace copies of A Thousand and One Nights, Tûtinâme: Tales of the Parrot, Hâyatülhayvan: Animal Fables , and Kenzülhavas: The Treasury of Pleasantries.
A book merchant of his acquaintance made a welcoming sign. Mümtaz approached with an expression indicating “How are things?”
The merchant gestured with his hand toward a series of old leather-bound books, stacked and tied with twine, on one end of a wooden bench. “A collection of old magazines, if you’d like to take a look.”
He untied the twine and handed Mümtaz the volumes, dusting them as he did so. Most of the leather covers were warped, and some of the bindings had cracked. Mümtaz sat on one edge of the bench with his feet dangling. He knew that the bookseller would no longer bother him; in fact, the man had put on his glasses and turned back to the handwritten manuscript on a bookrest.
Mümtaz examined the volumes that looked as if they had been slowly and gradually roasted by fire, and he remembered the last time he’d come to this shop, last May – bliss was in that spring to be alive. An hour had remained before he was to meet Nuran; he’d stopped here to pass the time and chat with the old bookseller, purchasing a handsome and nicely bound Şakâyık-ı Numaniye , a sixteenth-century Ottoman biographical encyclopedia by Taşköprüzade with its addendum. That day he’d gone with Nuran to the two Çekmece lakes. Though he’d explored all of Istanbul with her, they hadn’t yet visited the lakes. He thought of the supper they’d shared at the smaller lake, at the restaurant nearly atop the water that invariably recalled Chinese floating houses, of the time they spent together in the stream-side garden of the hunter’s coffeehouse at the foot of the bridge reached by a wooden stairway. In the vicinity, fishermen caught striped mullet as they shouted from rowboat to rowboat in piercing voices. A chorus of cries rose abruptly and men naked from the waist up made several direct and determined movements before the net strung between two boats gradually emerged from the water, glistening like a shield of abundance, with little quicksilver sparkles flailing along its perimeter, and the great haul shone like a mirror held to the
Taken as a whole, it constituted a bizarre accretion that appeared simply to be the result of intellectual indigestion. Mümtaz realized that this omnium gatherum had been engaged in a hundred-year struggle and a continuous sloughing of skin.
An entire society grew despondent, strove, and suffered through anomie and birth pangs for a century so that digests of detective novels and these Jules Vernes might replace copies of A Thousand and One Nights, Tûtinâme: Tales of the Parrot, Hâyatülhayvan: Animal Fables , and Kenzülhavas: The Treasury of Pleasantries.
A book merchant of his acquaintance made a welcoming sign. Mümtaz approached with an expression indicating “How are things?”
The merchant gestured with his hand toward a series of old leather-bound books, stacked and tied with twine, on one end of a wooden bench. “A collection of old magazines, if you’d like to take a look.”
He untied the twine and handed Mümtaz the volumes, dusting them as he did so. Most of the leather covers were warped, and some of the bindings had cracked. Mümtaz sat on one edge of the bench with his feet dangling. He knew that the bookseller would no longer bother him; in fact, the man had put on his glasses and turned back to the handwritten manuscript on a bookrest.
Mümtaz examined the volumes that looked as if they had been slowly and gradually roasted by fire, and he remembered the last time he’d come to this shop, last May – bliss was in that spring to be alive. An hour had remained before he was to meet Nuran; he’d stopped here to pass the time and chat with the old bookseller, purchasing a handsome and nicely bound Şakâyık-ı Numaniye , a sixteenth-century Ottoman biographical encyclopedia by Taşköprüzade with its addendum. That day he’d gone with Nuran to the two Çekmece lakes. Though he’d explored all of Istanbul with her, they hadn’t yet visited the lakes. He thought of the supper they’d shared at the smaller lake, at the restaurant nearly atop the water that invariably recalled Chinese floating houses, of the time they spent together in the stream-side garden of the hunter’s coffeehouse at the foot of the bridge reached by a wooden stairway. In the vicinity, fishermen caught striped mullet as they shouted from rowboat to rowboat in piercing voices. A chorus of cries rose abruptly and men naked from the waist up made several direct and determined movements before the net strung between two boats gradually emerged from the water, glistening like a shield of abundance, with little quicksilver sparkles flailing along its perimeter, and the great haul shone like a mirror held to the
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