Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

In that case, without the need for a physician, pharmacy, medicines, or compassion, people died huddled together, embracing, entwined, and sharing their greatest intimacies with one another. But dying an idiosyncratic death at home in one’s bed had a set protocol: a Koran chanter and recitations, a priest, a doctor, a pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, shed tears, blessed water, the peal of bells. . Only through these acts and signs could death come to fruition. These were accoutrements that the human intellect had appended to the order of nature. This is how things transpired among humans. In fact, nature was ignorant. It knew nothing of the existence of these addenda. Death in nature was entirely different: Sensing the scattering turbine of cosmic time spinning within one’s body and soul, losing incrementally first one’s memories, then memory itself, then one’s sense and sensation, scattering into countless elementary particles that skitter away from each other into the eternal void in proportion to the speed of this whirling blade; this, then, is death in nature.

Through Macide’s unblinking courage, this turbine spinning within İhsan had stopped, just like the momentary pause of the ceiling fan above the wardrobe when switched to reverse — a veritable winged creature on the verge of taking flight — it had stopped in an act of no small significance.

Mümtaz again gazed at İhsan’s face, and making an ambiguous sign, left the room. He moved slowly, as if wading through water, amid thoughts that he himself didn’t quite understand.

Numerous diaphanous membranes separated him from material objects. Or maybe the realm in which he moved, thought, and spoke was not the same realm in which he physically lived. . as if he engaged his surroundings through a persona that was purely observational. He perceived, registered, and contemplated his environment. But this perception, cognition, and even communication transpired through an identity that had lost its mass and had all but atomized.

He turned on the light in the foyer and, as always, stared into the mirror. Mümtaz never passed up the opportunity to look into any mirror. For him, mirrors were symbols of human fate or the potential of the intellect before the unknown.

He gazed into the mirror; the light settled into the flat, crystalline glass with a slight tremor, taking in the entire foyer. Mirrors were strange; they set to work instantly. Mümtaz had the appearance of somebody who’d just woken up. At the other end of the foyer rested four pair of shoes belonging to İhsan. On the wall hung a thick-handled umbrella. Would he be able to use these items again? Why not? Stopping the momentum of the scattering turbine was sufficient to live. Then one could pass from cosmic time to the plane of people and life. This was a restorative place where all wounds were healed, all flaws smoothed out, where the hours of the clock were friends to mankind.

Four pairs, two of which he’d just purchased at the start of summer. A black and a yellow pair of the variety that could be worn in winter. When Mümtaz teased, “ Aǧabey , you’ve bought winter shoes in summer!” İhsan replied with the seriousness he displayed at such times, “I’m a prudent man.” A prudent man! Had he been prudent, would he have come down with pneumonia?

Mümtaz stared at the shoes. In this world, how little we’re able to appropriate the objects around us. These shoes, this umbrella, the things in this house, the house itself, like everything else, belonged to İhsan. There were the things that were his and the things he shared with others. But tomorrow, Allah forbid, if something were to befall him. .

All of it would be released from his possession. If only somebody who remembered, or a mnemonic source, would appear. Genuine preservation only occurred with others and through others. The human intellect, the human heart, the human soul, the human memory. . When the human component withdraws, nothing remains at the center. The center cannot hold. Granted, certain animals, too, never forget their owners or where they live… But this was a trait that had passed from humans to animals. He switched off the light. The four pairs of shoes, the umbrella, the items purchased that evening and left on the little table, the stove-like brazier, everything disappeared. The glass of the mirror became the realm of certain borderless, even formless, shadows beneath the indeterminate light filtering in through the window. How quickly everything had vanished. With the comportment of a scientist performing an experiment, he switched on the light. Again, on the flat mirror surface that reflected part of the foyer more brightly, as well as in the entryway itself, objects came alive in sharp clarity, through shapes and sizes gathered one atop the other and within silent, relative positioning — vivid, harmonious, cognizant of their substantiation, and overjoyed to exist together, to complete an arbitrary totality. These things exist without me as well! The presence of light is sufficient. Light, that is, any medium of stimulus, and under its command, cooperating with it, consciousness or memory. . In that case, I am indeed necessary! Me or anyone else. . even the last man, if you like.

He closed the door with the same care with which he’d descended the stairs. The street, despite the desolate night, gradually filled with some luminance and evening sounds. Certain details were enough to evoke the summer nocturne: the peep of a few frogs, the buzzing of insects, and, in the distance at the head of the street, the gushing spout of an old fountain, which appeared like a scale laid aground, situated between the alley and the larger road onto which it opened.

Onto the spotted and green nocturnal backdrop, which resembled a frog’s back, rumblings of empty streetcars and indeterminate sounds leaped like flames before sputtering out. This was the hour when poets claimed that everything slept. A kitten sheltered in a neighbor’s doorway suddenly — startled like a wild animal — arched its back at Mümtaz, puffing up as if to pounce. Mümtaz glared at the feline — they usually unsettled him — threatening to teach it a good lesson. It seemed there was a correlation between this kitten’s fear and the way everything he’d observed for days in his life, in the omnium gatherum of his thoughts, and in his mind’s eye, assumed the form of a tormenting idea. For months now I’ve been in turmoil. . Had I remained by myself, everything would have returned to normal. At least we wouldn’t have separated on bad terms. . Trying to the best of his ability not to think, he quickly turned onto the boulevard of streetcars. He walked, searching up and down both sides of the street for an empty taxicab. The physician’s house wasn’t far; it was within walking distance. Hopefully he’d be at home, open the door, and return to the house with Mümtaz.

But the doctor wasn’t home. The man who’d said, “I’m at your command always, it’s my duty!” had vanished by eight P.M. Not just him, the entire household. . Mümtaz rang the bell at length and pounded the door. But not a peep could be heard. Has the entire household entered into the slumber of death? Finally the door cracked open, and a servant in unkempt clothes stated that the doctor and missus had decided to make an overnight visit at a late hour.

“Who goes on an overnight visit after eight?”

“If one has the means, one goes after eight as well — ” The servant, afraid sleep would escape her should she speak for another second, shut the door without finishing.

With no other recourse, he went to Beyazıt and called on the state physician. From the moment he’d left the house, his anxieties had multiplied. With each passing moment he grew more afraid that catastrophe would strike should he be delayed any longer. No one was on the street. Only far in the distance, at a bend where, from his perspective, the street appeared to end, a group of trolley laborers gathered over a node of heliotrope light, which appeared more poignant in the night, repairing streetcar rails within a chiaroscuro play of light and shadow that recalled Rembrandt’s canvases.