Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

İhsan raised his glass, “First we drink,” he said. “Then we partake of these fish that this sea of splendor has bequeathed to us. And we give thanks that we are before this sea, at this spring hour, in this restaurant. Later we’ll try to establish a new life particular to us and befitting our own idiom. Life is ours; we’ll give it the form that we desire. And as it assumes its form, it’ll sing its song. But we won’t meddle with art or ideas at all! We’ll set them free. For they demand freedom, absolute freedom. A myth, solely because we long for it, doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. No, it erupts from social life. But to cut our ties with the past and to close ourselves off from the West! Never! What do you think we are? We’re the essence of Easterners of taste and pleasure. Everything yearns for our persistence and continuity.”

“Once you’ve let the past persist like that, why even bother with a New Life?”

“Because our existence still hasn’t found its form, that’s why! In any case, life’s always in need of organization. Especially in our era.”

“In that case we’re purging the past?”

“Of course… but only where needed. We’ll cast out dead roots; we’ll engage in a new enterprise and foster new people and society…”

“Where will we find the initiative to do this?”

“From our own necessities and our own will to live; at any rate, we don’t need initiative, we need instruction. And reality itself will provide this, not vague notions of utopia!”

Suad wiped his brow with his hand. “I’m not talking about utopia. . but I want to hear the sounds of unadulterated folk songs. I want to look out upon the world through new eyes. Not just for Turkey, I want this for the entire world. I want to hear songs of tribute sung for the newly born.”

“You want justice, you want rights.”

“No, not like that! Those are meaningless words. The New Man won’t acknowledge a single remnant of the past…”

Mümtaz, with an eye on the customers entering through the door, said, “Do let us invite Suad to provide a description of this New Man!”

“I can’t! He has yet to be born. But he will be born, of that I’m certain. The entire world is moaning from the labor of his birth. Take Spain for example!”

İhsan: “If all you aspire to is that, rest assured, soon all of Europe, even the planet, will resemble Spain. But do you really think that some type of New Man has been born in Spain or Russia? To me, it seems rather that the ground is being prepared for human catastrophe.”

“Are you making a prophecy?”

“No, just an observation… an observation that could be made by any reader of your average daily paper.”

Suad fiddled for a while with his empty glass, then extending it to İbrahim, he said, “If you would, please.” Topping the rakı -filled glass with water, he took a first sip. “If this happened, what of it, anyway? It’s not that I oppose its occurrence. Humanity can only rid itself of obsolete life-molds through such a conflagration…”

“So it can be reduced to even more inferior molds. We all know the outcome of the last world war.”

But Suad wasn’t listening: “Not to mention that war has become unavoidable now. Such convoluted accounts could only be settled through war.” Then he suddenly glanced toward İhsan. “You don’t actually hope for anything new from humanity, do you?”

“Could one ever lose hope in humanity? I just don’t anticipate anything good from war. It’ll spell the end of civilization. I don’t expect anything worthwhile to emerge from war, revolution, or populist dictators. War means an absolute catastrophe for Europe, and maybe the world.” And as if speaking to himself, he continued: “I haven’t lost faith in humanity, but I don’t trust individuals. To begin with, once their ties are broken, they change completely; they become like programmed machines… and suddenly it seems as if they resemble deaf and senseless forces of nature. The terrifying aspect of war and revolution is that it amounts to the sudden unleashing of a rudimentary force, one that we’d assumed we’d tamed through centuries of discipline, socialization, and culture.”

“That is exactly what I want, revolution.”

İhsan sighed, exasperated.

“Meanwhile, we could hope for better. But what good is hope when humanity is this frail? Yes, it’s hard to trust humanity, but if we consider its fate, there isn’t a creature as pitiable as man.”

“I admire mankind. I admire its power to fight constraints. Fully aware of its fate yet engaging in life nevertheless, I admire that courage. Which of us on a starlit night doesn’t carry the weight of all Creation on our backs? Nothing could be as beautiful as the courage of humanity. Had I been a poet, I would have penned a single work, a grand epic describing the venture of humanity stretching from our first ancestors who stood on two legs to the present. Initial thoughts, initial fears, initial love, initial stirrings of intelligence gradually becoming cognizant of Creation, the integration of everything that had once existed independently, the myriad innovations with which we’ve augmented Nature… our act of creating Allah around us and within us. Indeed, I’d write only one piece. I’d describe how I longed to sing the praises of humanity awakening matter from its sleep and subduing Creation with its own spirit. Oh language that embraces all exalted things! Oh words, come to my aid!”

İhsan eyed his food skeptically: “That’s quite a display of exuberance there, isn’t it, Mümtaz? You sound just like one of those nineteenth-century disciples of civilization.”

“No, on the contrary. Because I don’t believe that these problems can ever be resolved. We’ll always kill and be killed. We’ll always live under some type of threat. I admire tragedy itself. True greatness resides in the courage we display despite our consciousness of death.”

“Mümtaz yearns to write a poem on evolution from gorilla to homo sapien.”

“Yes, the evolution from gorilla to human. Thank you for reminding me. Meanwhile, the war you crave is the obliteration of this notion. Now, are we to revert from human being back to ape? Dostoyevsky best understood the predicament in which we find ourselves.” İhsan returned his glass to the table without drinking from it. “The war that you desire will take us there. After two more world wars, nothing will remain of culture or civilization. We’ll lose the ideal of freedom for all eternity.”

“I know that much as well. But the bankruptcy of spirit within us and the misery surrounding us, our penchant for expending men like so much fodder and the environment of fear this gives rise to… then just think about the calamity of people’s realization that this is an obligatory part of life! All of it foretells the approach of the end of an era. We expect it, even if it proves to be an apocalypse.”

“Keep the change…”

Adile glared scornfully at her husband, and in a soft voice that nonetheless glinted sharply and blindingly with a desire for bloodletting, hissed, “It just grows on trees, doesn’t it?”

Sabih cocked an eyebrow, casting a customary look of sweetness at his wife. He knew the reason she’d be annoyed by everything for the remainder of the day. I’ll just sit in a corner and stay out of the conversation. Let our hosts put up with her! Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to his wife the way one might get used to the quirks of an old jalopy. She stalled randomly, occasionally her brakes wouldn’t catch, her gears slipped unexpectedly, and without warning she sped off full throttle. Sabih’s task was to prevent the old rattletrap from causing an accident. In essence she was a fine woman; he’d grown used to her. And their life together was comfortable. Granted, Sabih had achieved this comfort through rather extreme sacrifices. In order to win her for himself, he’d virtually relinquished half his personality. And I’m not quite sure one can get on in the world with just half a self.