When he died in 1934 at the age of fifty-two, he left a fortune so large that my father and my uncle never managed to find their way to the end of it, in spite of a long succession of failed business ventures.

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.

from the bond between us. But we live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, so I am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I’ve stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building. My mother’s sorrowful voice comes back to me: “Why don’t you go outside for a while? Why don’t you try a change of scene, do some traveling

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

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.

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.

he suffers from grief, emptiness, and inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah, because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough. Moreover, it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes him distress.

But even as I pondered these dilemmas—if you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay, and the passage of time or are you submitting to it?—I grew very bored with them.