Snow, on a Solitary Christmas Day

Halfway through Snow, Orhan Pamuk's well-celebrated political novel, I found myself falling in love with the same chapters, same lines, same ideas, that first struck me when I opened this book in 2009, after a very lucky hand unearthed this piece from a local thrift shop.

Serendipitously, this answered my current predicament. Snow talks of characters who are afraid of their own voices, termed affectionately by the beautiful Ipek as the "silence of snow." And so, amidst the struggles in my heart and the thirsty spirit that thrives within me (naks), I opened this book out of nowhere and am again enamored by its straightforward almost emotionless passages. And I'm still one chapter short of the climax, mind you.

While I'm not a poet, I think this paragraph perfectly captures my creative dilemma:

Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. This issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers... Happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterward either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

And this passage, this familiar moment of epiphany, gave me chills:

So it was that Ka heard the call from deep inside him: the call he heard only at moments of inspiration, the only sound that could ever make him happy, the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years, a poem was calling to him; although he had yet to hear the words, he knew it was already written; even as it waited in its hiding place, it radiated the power and beauty of destiny. Ka's heart rejoiced. 

While this monologue from Muhtar broke my heart:

Everyone wanted to die or leave. But I had nowhere to go. It was as if I'd been erased from history, banished from civilization. The civilized world seemed far away and I couldn't imitate it. God wouldn't even give me a child who might do all the things I had done, who might release me from my misery by becoming the westernized, modern, self-possessed individual I had always dreamed of becoming. 

As well as this realization:

But even having said this, neither would find it in him to add what he could not admit even to himself: It's because we failed to find happiness in poetry that we find ourselves longing for the shadow of politics.

And at last, when Ka had finally found his voice as a poet and has been churning out one poem after another--inspired, nonetheless--I am captured by this statement:

"There are two kinds of men," said Ka, in a didactic voice. "The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sorts of stories people tell about her. The second type of man--and I am in this category--can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

I am not alone after all. If women were the same, I'd say I'm the second type. That, I believe, is the bane of attraction: of letting emotions surpass logic in all aspects. - 12/25/2012