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All happy cities resemble one another (as Tolstoy famously observed of families) but each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston, share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is hüzün, 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, hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because of not being close enough to God; for St 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. Hüzün is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes the sufferer distress. “It is the failure to experience hüzün,” says Pamuk, “that leads him to feel it.” According to Pamuk, hüzün is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. “What I’m trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, “is the hüzün of an entire city: of Istanbul.”
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There is a past tense in Turkish that does not exist in English, that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay and that which 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.”
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The full review: http://www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/documents/PamukMyCityinRuins.pdf
Alberto Manguel's column in Geist: http://www.geist.com/author/manguel-alberto
