- Excerpts from Chapter 10 "Istanbul" (Orhan Pamuk)
“To the true Sufis, hüzün 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 Sufi 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 hüzün that causes him distress. It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it; he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is be following this logic to its conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem.”
“The hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.”
“Istanbul does not carry its Hüzün as `an illness for which there is a cure’ or ‘an unbidden pain from which we need to be delivered’: It carries its hüzün by choice. Ans 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. Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it too expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. …… Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.”
Blue River