The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International)

the ever elusive hope that I was beginning to recover. This hope gave me courage, and I began to dream—within pain, but gladly—that I could soon return to my former life, and that I would make love to Sibel, and that we would marry and begin a normal, happy married life. But these fantasies were short-lived; before a day had passed, the old familia

I could not forget her.

For her, love was something to which one devoted one’s entire being at the risk of everything. But this happened only once in a lifetime.

As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take its first solo walk outside the body.

During those carefree days when Füsun and I met every day in secret, I never asked myself such questions, behaving only like a child greedily gulping one sweet after another.

It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it.

It was a love fed not by sexual appetite but by a fierce compassion,

But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful.