Huzun and Orhan Pamuk's *Istanbul*

"According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, 'a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.' For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress. 'It is the failure to experience huzun,' Pamuk says, 'that leads him to feel it.' According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. 'What I am trying to explain,' he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, 'is the huzun of an entire city: of Istanbul.' ...There is a past tense in Turkish -- it does not exist in English -- that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay and what he has seen with his own eyes. "When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense," Pamuk explains. This is the tense in which his book seems to be written, in a voice on the edge of reality, halfway between what he knows has happened and what he believes imaginatively to be true. This voice, this tone, this tense, is perfectly suited to describing melancholy."

Orhan Pamik won the Nobel Prize for Literature just a year ago.

http://cambridgeforecast.wordpress.com/2006/10/12/orhan-pamuk-istanbul-the-concept-of-huzun/