Istanbul (Vintage International)

Combining medical science with philosophy, he advises his readers to seek relief in reason, work, resignation, virtue, discipline, and fasting—another interesting instance of common ground underlying these two texts that rise out of such very different cultural traditions.

feel compelled to add or so I’ve been told. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we “remember” our earliest life experiences, our c

The center of the Turkish film industry—which put out seven hundred films a year in those days and was ranked second largest in the world, after India—was in Beyoğlu, on Yeşilçam Street, only ten minutes away,

(Just as, almost by instinct, I find myself opening this parenthesis, suggesting that I have no desire, none at all, to recall this incident.)

According to the first tradition, we experience the thing called hüzün when we have invested too much in worldly pleasures and material gain; the implication is, “If you hadn’t involved yourself so deeply in this transitory world, if you were a good and true Muslim, you wouldn’t care so much about your worldly losses.”

not just the cobblestone streets and pavements, the iron grilles on the windows or the empty, ramshackle wooden houses—rather, it is the suggestion that, with evening having just fallen, these two people dragging long shadows with them on their way home are actually pulling the blanket of night over the entire city.

Life can’t be all that bad, I’d think from time to time. Whatever happens, I can always take a walk along the Bosphorus.

Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed.

At least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date?