Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“Do you think it’ll happen?”

“As one looking at events from the outside, I don’t give much credence to the idea of an immediate war. . But the world is so fraught and prepared to accept this catastrophe. .”

He stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s a strange state of affairs… How should I put it? I don’t give much credence to the outbreak of war. It seems unlikely to me because it’s so sinister and devastating; I think that almost no one, even the most crazed, the most bloodthirsty, the most robotic, the most inhuman, or the most deluded (phantasies about ourselves are the most insidious), will have the courage, but will refrain from engaging at the last minute; and will suddenly toss the torch away from the stoked hearth of death. Do you know what the last hope is? Often, the last hope rests in expressing the impossibility of the intention!” He stopped again and took a deep breath. Mümtaz noted with sorrow and remorse that they were still only at Vezneciler; yet, he listened to the doctor with rapt attention. “Let me give you an indication of how weak this hope is. For years, all of our hopes were focused on the ones instigating this jingoism, the politicos deliberating as if obsessively over an arithmetic formula. Just think: For years they’ve prepared for this outcome as if concocting a pharmacological formula, prepping an operating room, or staging a theatrical performance. First they stamped each natural phase of life, every cause and effect as a ‘crisis’ to find excuses to increase their strength and scope by multiples of three or four. . Now what are we taking stock in? Nothing short of a miracle: The possibility of a sudden about-face by the same warmongers who have provoked the crisis and made matters so untenable; the abrupt return to peace and quiet after unprecedented instigation; and an organic understanding of things instead of through the lenses of vested interest…

“What’s truly frightening is that all the players, that is, adversaries, each espouse distinct states of mind and spirit. Some are overcome by the luxury of comfort, inaction, or implausible ideals; some are seduced by the insanity of absolute action. Or, you know, leaders who think that only their own acts of courage can resolve the dilemma… Who supports that mind-set?”

This time the doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand, and, as if afraid of leaving his thoughts incomplete, began to speak rapidly. Mümtaz noticed that the night had clouded like a chalice whose contents had been mixed with another substance.

“This is the tragedy. But there’s more. Even the most indecisive are still in the midst of the fracas. Therefore, everybody believes only his own evidence. This belief is goading the most insane actions by Hitler. But that’s not all, gradually we’ve come to believe that war is the only option. And that’s not all.

“We assume that there will be war, one of the great wars of history. Meanwhile, the world has united before the faces of politicians, has linked incidents together, and is preparing for a civil war. Civil war, that is, one of the ways in which civilizations slough their skins. We’re living through the metamorphosis of such a great organism, so great as to be incompre-hensible within its own reality, that it resembles a delirium or nightmare of nature. We’re at a point, if the term is appropriate, a physiological point, in which the entire context has prepared for collapse and made it inevitable. . It’s so easy to avoid a political war. . An abrupt change of course or the temporary return of common sense could resolve the whole problem. But overcoming a crisis of civilization or maintaining one’s state of mind in the midst of its stumbling, is like trying to confront it without losing control of the rudder, being swept away by flood, drowning in a typhoon, or being pulverized in a meteor shower. .”

“You’re quite a fatalist, doctor. .”

“Because I’m a man who believes in processes of nature. For years I managed a physiology lab. I saw tens of thousands of patients. I think I can now tell the difference between what can be avoided and what can’t. . I can tell from a distance the precise spot death has chosen to settle. .”

“But isn’t this a separate matter?”

“Wherever there happens to be the organization of a system, there you will find more or less the rule of biological laws… Don’t think for a minute that I’m being pessimistic in order to take a comparison to its furthest limit. I believe that interventions will always be possible: I’m a physician; that is, I’ve been trained in the discipline of interventions. However, the condition has been intentionally exacerbated to spread throughout the organism. . Look at it from another perspective.

“In an era in which everything’s in a muddle, in which disconnected questions are posed independently, parallel to each other, in which each door of hope reveals a dragon’s maw, just consider the catastrophe of a human fate held in the hands of a cadre of half-mad fanatics, irresponsible false prophets, determinists of production and overproduction, of utopians who clearly express good faith only through the report of weapons, who find their mettle through death sentences, and who hide behind masks of truth. Take for example Stalin’s pact. What a chain of events. An event that could be described as paranoia from Hitler’s perspective, is nothing but perfectly premeditated malice for Stalin. Don’t forget the way Lenin’s mongoloid, prophetic profile turned suddenly Machiavellian beyond all description. How it all became an intrigue worthy of a detective story. How Stalin kept the promise of his own persona and of the stare in his photographs.

“In the name of an ideal that would foster a paradise on earth, how he trained a weapon of death, which bore the possibility of one day being turned upon him, onto the entirety of humanity. He’s openly promoting war, preparing the possibility of its outbreak. He’s saying, ‘Do not fear me, have conviction!’ A trivial, but if you want to know the truth, extremely cunning, gesture. The chroniclers of old would have praised him to the skies. But this is nothing but resorting to crime, even if it’s for the sake of protecting his own hide. It’s like prodding the hand holding the torch toward the hearth. If we enter into his logic, maybe he’s justified from his own perspective. But only from his point of view. . Meanwhile, in today’s world, there should be no vantage point reserved only for oneself. It’s possible to explain this to you, to myself, to the banker in Antwerp, the railroad engineer in Brussels, I don’t know, to everybody. Yet how could one ever explain this to a mystic, to people who assume the world is a vast stage upon which they’re only players, to people who start with the assumption that death in cold blood is a viable answer to their desires? One declares, ‘Allah determines my role,’ while the other claims, ‘I’ve emerged through historical determinism.’”

In the narrow alley onto which they’d turned, the redolence of flowers wafting over the walls of a manse of time-past in the still night settled deeply into Mümtaz with a poignant and lethal sensation — as if through the nostalgia of lost happiness and hope as well as obliterated dreams, like a qualm, like the mercilessly unforgiving consciousness of a criminal affront against the nefs of one’s desires, afflicting one like an angel of torment for the duration of one’s life; yes, just like the dominant melody of the recently played concerto discovering itself more fully at each flare and flourish, yes, ripple by ripple, pulling gradually away from the abundance as its own self, and finally, like a golden serpent, recoiling within one’s being.

He felt exceedingly miserable. He suffered as if he’d committed all of these crimes himself, and he understood to a deeper degree, through this torment he bore due to no fault of his own, the extent to which humanity was a totality, and how every transgression against the whole amounted to a primal sin.