Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“What do we know about motors? Do what I said.”

He hung up the phone. He sat back down. He was somewhat bothered that his conversation had been overheard. For the sake of doing something, anything, he put on his black glasses. From a great distance, he asked Mümtaz:

“Everything’s in order, is it not?”

Mümtaz slid the blue envelope into his pocket. His eyes stared at the telephone as if to ask, “Anything else you’d like to tell us?” and he bid farewell to the shopkeeper. Swept by a peculiar feeling of embarrassment, he wasn’t able to look at the man’s face.

No political discussion or dossier could have informed him about current affairs as did this conversation, only half of which he’d heard. War was imminent. He ambled, staggered and distraught, wiping his brow frequently.

“There will be a war,” he said. This was different from any ordinary mobilization; it was more certain, more decisive. Determination of one hundred, one thousand percent. Within all these shops, such silent preparation continued; telephones were answered and instantly tin, rawhide, paint, and machine parts were sucked out of the market; numbers changed, zeroes multiplied, and opportunities decreased. The imminence of war. We’ll be going, all of us will go. Was he afraid? He assessed himself. He believed he wasn’t.

At least what he felt at the moment couldn’t be called fear. He was only disturbed. Some colorless and formless entity, a creature whose nature he didn’t yet know, had coiled within him. He’d have to wait to determine what it was exactly. I’m not afraid of death. I’ve lived so close to death my whole life. . There’s no reason to fear it. War, however, even for those sent to the front, wasn’t just death. Death was simple. At times one could even see it as a last resort. Mümtaz had repeatedly seen it as a land of salvation, a far shore that had to be reached, just like a swimmer who thinks his fatigue will end after the remaining five or ten strokes and his feet touch ground. In all likelihood, most people thought this way. No, death itself wasn’t terrible, relative to the way it grew difficult along with everything else; to the way this fundamental event, this prearranged agreement, became a knotted ball of yarn incapable of being undone so that five or ten strokes of water filled with a thousand obstacles. Away, alone, alas, a love, all my suffering will end there, at that threshold. . Do we all think so? Are we the children of death or of life? Which of these two forces winds our clockwork: the hands of the seasons or the fingers of eternal darkness? Death is an absolute. But considering that my own mote of humanity hit the lottery of life, seeing that all Creation down to the tiniest element has come to life for me, in that case, in this terra lucida , this paradise of feelings and senses, this preposterous Walt Disney production, let me live my lot to the utmost! No, he couldn’t conceive of it like this, either. This was too simplistic as well. It amounted to remaining external, to living on surfaces. We don’t just remain at the door, we enter the abode, and take ownership of it, adopt it, declare that it’s ours, we desire it, and we take pleasure in doing so. We weep after those who have left us, falling at their feet to say, “Do not leave!” We don’t simply let things separate from us.

We aren’t just passive guests at a table; perhaps we’re always creating and producing the things in our midst. None of us accepts life as an arbitrary condition of material circumstances. Even thinkers devoted to analyzing this have stayed in the game until the very end. Everything comes from us, comes with us, happens through us.

Neither death nor life exists. We exist. Both are inherent in us. All other things are just immense or tiny accidents passing in the mirror of time. A mountain on Mars erupts and disintegrates. Streams of molten rock harden on the lunar surface. New solar systems appear like the massive droplets of milk shimmering in the light of the sun amid the Milky Way. Coral reefs form at the bottom of the seas, and stars implode in colorful and fiery pyrotechnics in the shadow of the moon, like April flowers scattering in the wind. The bird eats the worm; in the bark of a tree, a hundred thousand larvae mature and a hundred thousand insects mingle into the earth. These are all phenomena that occur involuntarily. They’re refractions illuminating, and occasionally darkening, that vast, rare, matchless pearl we call Creation, that solitary blossom of time, that lotus of the ages.

Only for mankind does time, monolithic and absolute, divide in two; and because time, this dim lantern, this sooty radiance, struggles to burn within us, because it introduces a complex calculus into the simplest things, because we measure its passing by our shadows on the ground, it divides life from death, and like a clock’s pendulum, our consciousness swings between the two polarities of our own creation. Humanity, this prisoner of time, is but desperate, trying to escape to the outside. Instead of losing itself in time, instead of flowing along with all else in a broad and continual riverrun, humanity tries to perceive time externally. Thus, time becomes a mechanism of torment. One lunge and we’re at the pole of death, everything’s over. Since we’ve split the unity of whole numbers, since we’ve consented to being fractions, we should resign ourselves to fragmentation. Momentum, however, sweeps us to the other pole; we’re in the midst of life, we’re full of vitality, we’re once again the plaything of our hurtling inertia; but yet again, by its very nature, the balance tips irrefutably toward death, and torments increase exponentially.

Fate took shape intrinsically because humanity fled beyond the limits of time through the intellect, resisted the order of love, and sought stability in the midst of profound change. Humanity’s actual fate was being slave to the light cast by a small night-lamp used only for seeing in shadows; being slave to an apparatus that tended to turn the shadows and darkness into a dungeon; in other words, being slave and sycophant to a small disembodied homunculus of light. However, the essential homunculus was born of reaction and synthesis between fire and water. It had more insight. The experiences that formed it also made it cognizant of its regrets and of the impossibilities surrounding it. Thus, as Goethe wrote, it knew to crash into sea nymph Galatea’s carriage, to shatter its little glass-flask container, and to vanish into the vast and formless aether. But the small night-lamp had no such courage. It simply concocted a fable for itself; it believed in that fable and wanted to be the master of life. In turn, it was consumed by death, just like a stream that filled the first hole it chanced upon after diverging from the main source, where it would become the victim of all types of delusions, principal among them the desire to be itself. Nothing was as natural as humanity’s torment! It paid for existence, its genuine existence, through consciousness. But humanity didn’t leave it at that; next to this great, unchanging imperative, it created brand-new fates over and over again. Because it lived, it created various and sundry deaths. These deaths were always only the products of the anxiety of existence. For true death wasn’t torment but deliverance: I’m letting go of it all, leaving it all behind to unite with eternity. I’ve become that enormous pearl itself, glimmering where consciousness ceases; not just a single mote; rather, I’m the entire entity.At the frontiers of consciousness, where no illumination casts a shadow, I’m an enormous white lotus shining from within, burning brightly. But no, not at all, instead Mümtaz thought: I think therefore I am, cogito ergo sum. I perceive therefore I am. I struggle therefore I am. I suffer, therefore I am! I’m wretched, I am. I’m a fool, I am, I am, I am!