A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Read Free Book Online Page A

caught. When he was ready to go back to school again, Macide was at his side. She prepared his schoolbag and checked his clothes. She wasn’t a mother or a sister but rather a guardian angel of sorts; her presence was like that of an alchemist who understood many mysteries, transforming everything, reconciling matter and man, and infusing the hours of the day with an air of sweetness and light.
    Mümtaz came to know İhsan later, upon entering into an intellectual life. Without letting on, İhsan had kept an eye on the youth, observing and nourishing his aptitudes and inclinations. When he’d reached the age of seventeen, Mümtaz felt ready to cross a threshold. He’d read the classical Ottoman divan collections and had savored the delicacies of history. İhsan himself taught the history course. On first seeing his older cousin in the classroom, Mümtaz thought, How am I to learn anything from a relative? But as class began, he understood that İhsan’s persona as teacher was distinct from that of the brother he knew so well. The entire class was awed from the first day. To them, İhsan was something like the eagle that had abducted Ganymede. He’d seized and capitivated them, and though he hadn’t taken them up to any Mount Olympus, he’d transported them to the heights of a path they’d subsequently descend by themselves.
    Years later he and his classmates recalled lines still fresh in their minds from this first lecture. And lessons continued at home for Mümtaz. He was astounded to realize that he’d become something of a young colleague to İhsan, who shared many of his ideas, argued with, and mentored him. One after another, he’d make requests like, “Search for this matter in Joseph von Hammer,” or, “Go see what that charlatan chronicler Şânizâde Mehmed Ataullah has to say,” or, “Find out about this business from Hoca Sadeddin Efendi’s Tâcüttevarih. ” Mümtaz would take up a large tome, sit at the table reserved for him in a corner of the room, and for hours, depending on the task at hand, note for İhsan details about the life of Hâlet Efendi, about the gifts sent with some embassy to Istanbul by the Hapsburg dynasty, or about the rationale for the Ottoman campaign to Egypt. İhsan aspired to write a comprehensive history of the Turks. It was to be a vehicle for organizing the social doctrine he espoused. Gradually he’d imparted his ideas to Mümtaz.
    Listening to İhsan, Mümtaz felt that he was rushing from one epiphany to another. They debated the format of the project together. İhsan wanted a chronological history: Beginning with the economic conditions the Ottoman Empire had inherited from the Byzantines, and proceeding year by year to the present. Conversely one might write up a series of great events; however, this wouldn’t constitute a collection of comprehensive surveys as İhsan desired, although institutions and events would be better addressed. Mümtaz favored this second format. Following a heated debate, İhsan agreed. Mümtaz would help with the project; specifically, he was to prepare the art and intellectual history sections. While continuing down the path that İhsan had blazed, Mümtaz’s inclinations drew him toward poetry and aesthetics. An aspiring poet’s greatest hope is to find his own voice through tools that developed an inner realm. By and by he’d discovered the French poets Régnier and master of the sonnet Heredia, then the symbolists Verlaine and Baudelaire, and each of them gave him a new horizon.
    Whatever he read or heard about later played in the peculiar stages erected in Mümtaz’s mind: the rocky outcroppings in Antalya and their house in N. All of the scenes in the novels he read took place in these two settings, from where they’d seep into his private life.
    Mümtaz found himself in Baudelaire. He was more or less indebted to İhsan for this discovery. İhsan wasn’t an artist. His creative side had been subsumed by history and