Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Mümtaz approved of his cousin’s bride at first sight. “I’m very pleased,” was his response to İhsan’s inquiring, however joking, so-what-do-you-think gesture. His naïve response bore a truth. Macide always infused her surroundings with a sense of contentment. This was part of her essence, secondary to her beauty, moral decency, and composure. With her arrival, life in the family changed dramatically. İhsan’s long silences eased and Aunt Sabire’s longing for bygone days waned. As for Mümtaz, he struck up a friendship with a woman twelve years his senior. Within a few weeks’ time, when he was accepted as a boarder at school, he felt the stirrings of remorse. The household in which he’d felt himself a guest had somehow become his own.

By belonging to a family that he loved, Mümtaz had staked a claim on life. The youth, who’d assumed on his last night in S. that everything would end and, due to his particular fate, that he’d remain ostracized from social life, suddenly found a new existence. Life besieged him and he was part of that life.

At the center of this life rested that exceptional creature, Macide, a petite woman who drew in her wake everything and everyone, magically transfiguring them. On weekends she’d pick Mümtaz up from school and, on empty stomachs, now stopping before shop fronts, now watching passersby come and go, they’d roam through the European quarter of Beyoǧlu for hours; then, like two truants who’d cut class, they’d return home in fear and dread of getting caught. When he was ready to go back to school again, Macide was at his side. She prepared his schoolbag and checked his clothes. She wasn’t a mother or a sister but rather a guardian angel of sorts; her presence was like that of an alchemist who understood many mysteries, transforming everything, reconciling matter and man, and infusing the hours of the day with an air of sweetness and light.

Mümtaz came to know İhsan later, upon entering into an intellectual life. Without letting on, İhsan had kept an eye on the youth, observing and nourishing his aptitudes and inclinations. When he’d reached the age of seventeen, Mümtaz felt ready to cross a threshold. He’d read the classical Ottoman divan collections and had savored the delicacies of history. İhsan himself taught the history course. On first seeing his older cousin in the classroom, Mümtaz thought, How am I to learn anything from a relative? But as class began, he understood that İhsan’s persona as teacher was distinct from that of the brother he knew so well. The entire class was awed from the first day. To them, İhsan was something like the eagle that had abducted Ganymede. He’d seized and capitivated them, and though he hadn’t taken them up to any Mount Olympus, he’d transported them to the heights of a path they’d subsequently descend by themselves.

Years later he and his classmates recalled lines still fresh in their minds from this first lecture. And lessons continued at home for Mümtaz. He was astounded to realize that he’d become something of a young colleague to İhsan, who shared many of his ideas, argued with, and mentored him. One after another, he’d make requests like, “Search for this matter in Joseph von Hammer,” or, “Go see what that charlatan chronicler Şânizâde Mehmed Ataullah has to say,” or, “Find out about this business from Hoca Sadeddin Efendi’s Tâcüttevarih. ” Mümtaz would take up a large tome, sit at the table reserved for him in a corner of the room, and for hours, depending on the task at hand, note for İhsan details about the life of Hâlet Efendi, about the gifts sent with some embassy to Istanbul by the Hapsburg dynasty, or about the rationale for the Ottoman campaign to Egypt. İhsan aspired to write a comprehensive history of the Turks. It was to be a vehicle for organizing the social doctrine he espoused. Gradually he’d imparted his ideas to Mümtaz.

Listening to İhsan, Mümtaz felt that he was rushing from one epiphany to another. They debated the format of the project together. İhsan wanted a chronological history: Beginning with the economic conditions the Ottoman Empire had inherited from the Byzantines, and proceeding year by year to the present. Conversely one might write up a series of great events; however, this wouldn’t constitute a collection of comprehensive surveys as İhsan desired, although institutions and events would be better addressed. Mümtaz favored this second format. Following a heated debate, İhsan agreed. Mümtaz would help with the project; specifically, he was to prepare the art and intellectual history sections. While continuing down the path that İhsan had blazed, Mümtaz’s inclinations drew him toward poetry and aesthetics. An aspiring poet’s greatest hope is to find his own voice through tools that developed an inner realm. By and by he’d discovered the French poets Régnier and master of the sonnet Heredia, then the symbolists Verlaine and Baudelaire, and each of them gave him a new horizon.

Whatever he read or heard about later played in the peculiar stages erected in Mümtaz’s mind: the rocky outcroppings in Antalya and their house in N. All of the scenes in the novels he read took place in these two settings, from where they’d seep into his private life.

Mümtaz found himself in Baudelaire. He was more or less indebted to İhsan for this discovery. İhsan wasn’t an artist. His creative side had been subsumed by history and economics. Even so, he understood poetry and painting well. In his youth he’d read French writers methodically. For seven years, he’d lived in the Latin Quarter together with other international cohorts. He’d lived through many trends, witnessed the birth of various theories, and participated in the roaring harvest fires of aesthetic debates. Later, after he’d returned to Istanbul, he’d abruptly forsaken it all, even the poets he loved the most. In an unanticipated way, he occupied himself with topics pertaining to Turks, cultivating this interest to the exclusion of others. Since he’d developed the measure of his aesthetic sense in Europe, he didn’t particularly distinguish local choices in art from others. He introduced Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman poets like Bâkî, Nef’î, Nâilî, Nedim, and Shaykh Galip, along with musicians like Dede and Itrî. And it was İhsan who handed him a copy of Baudelaire. “Since you’re reading poetry, you might as well read an alchemist of genius,” he said, before reciting a few poems from memory. That week Mümtaz hadn’t gone to school. A mild grippe kept him in bed. It had been a bitter winter besides. All of Istanbul lay swathed in snow. İhsan, at the edge of his aunt’s bed, holding the leather-bound Flowers of Evil he’d just bought Mümtaz — perhaps with his eyes trained on his own youth, when a group of them were enamored of the red-haired Mademoiselle Romantique, when they pined for her, spending entire nights till dawn roaming from café to café — İhsan read in his gruff voice, “Invitation to the Voyage,” “Autumn Sonnet,” and “The Irremediable.”

Mümtaz couldn’t put Baudelaire down. Much later the Symbolist Mallarmé and the Romantic Nerval joined the poets he admired. But by the time the young gentleman became acquainted with them, he was of an age to determine his own course and savor the literature that appealed to his own sensibilities.

Mümtaz had witnessed an ordeal during this period. Like a figure in a novel, he’d confronted tragedy at a young age, ensuring that it would always afflict him. His mind had blossomed to love and thought during the span between his father’s death and his return to Istanbul. These two months had nourished his soul in a strange way. He still relived those days in his dreams; agony frequently roused him from sleep, covered in sweat. Like a leitmotif, a vision of his first instance of consciousness lost colored these dreams: his father trying to light the crystal lantern amid the thud of artillery fire, the rasp of a pickax and shovel, murmurings, and his mother’s wailing. And the convoluted memory of his first carnal passion never faded. As he lay beside his afflicted mother, the coiling of the young peasant woman’s tired body about him, the gaze of her incognizant eyes, the pleasure wrapped in anguish, disturbed his thoughts and being. Yet, everyday events, that is, time, made him forget about this level of affliction and unendurable suffering. But when melancholy found him, it stirred within him like a Hydra-headed serpent, slithering around and constricting him. Classmates told him that he howled in his sleep. For this reason he’d stopped boarding in his last years at Galatasaray.