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

economics. Even so, he understood poetry and painting well. In his youth he’d read French writers methodically. For seven years, he’d lived in the Latin Quarter together with other international cohorts. He’d lived through many trends, witnessed the birth of various theories, and participated in the roaring harvest fires of aesthetic debates. Later, after he’d returned to Istanbul, he’d abruptly forsaken it all, even the poets he loved the most. In an unanticipated way, he occupied himself with topics pertaining to Turks, cultivating this interest to the exclusion of others. Since he’d developed the measure of his aesthetic sense in Europe, he didn’t particularly distinguish local choices in art from others. He introduced Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman poets like Bâkî, Nef’î, Nâilî, Nedim, and Shaykh Galip, along with musicians like Dede and Itrî. And it was İhsan who handed him a copy of Baudelaire. “Since you’re reading poetry, you might as well read an alchemist of genius,” he said, before reciting a few poems from memory. That week Mümtaz hadn’t gone to school. A mild grippe kept him in bed. It had been a bitter winter besides. All of Istanbul lay swathed in snow. İhsan, at the edge of his aunt’s bed, holding the leather-bound Flowers of Evil he’d just bought Mümtaz – perhaps with his eyes trained on his own youth, when a group of them were enamored of the red-haired Mademoiselle Romantique, when they pined for her, spending entire nights till dawn roaming from café to café – İhsan read in his gruff voice, “Invitation to the Voyage,” “Autumn Sonnet,” and “The Irremediable.”
    Mümtaz couldn’t put Baudelaire down. Much later the Symbolist Mallarmé and the Romantic Nerval joined the poets he admired. But by the time the young gentleman became acquainted with them, he was of an age to determine his own course and savor the literature that appealed to his own sensibilities.
     
    Mümtaz had witnessed an ordeal during this period. Like a figure in a novel, he’d confronted tragedy at a young age, ensuring that it would always afflict him. His mind had blossomed to love and thought during the span between his father’s death and his return to Istanbul. These two months had nourished his soul in a strange way. He still relived those days in his dreams; agony frequently roused him from sleep, covered in sweat. Like a leitmotif, a vision of his first instance of consciousness lost colored these dreams: his father trying to light the crystal lantern amid the thud of artillery fire, the rasp of a pickax and shovel, murmurings, and his mother’s wailing. And the convoluted memory of his first carnal passion never faded. As he lay beside his afflicted mother, the coiling of the young peasant woman’s tired body about him, the gaze of her incognizant eyes, the pleasure wrapped in anguish, disturbed his thoughts and being. Yet, everyday events, that is, time, made him forget about this level of affliction and unendurable suffering. But when melancholy found him, it stirred within him like a Hydra-headed serpent, slithering around and constricting him. Classmates told him that he howled in his sleep. For this reason he’d stopped boarding in his last years at Galatasaray.

V
    Come afternoon, he paid a visit to the tenant, and on his return he stopped at the Beyazıt coffeehouse. This two- or three-hour journey, like poking one’s nose out into the dark night of a snowstorm, had quickly informed him of a number of circumstances. When he’d just about arrived in Beyazıt, the trolley stopped for the crossing of a military detachment. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Mümtaz stepped off the streetcar to walk the remainder of the way. He’d long enjoyed this route. He was fond of watching the pigeons beneath the huge walnut tree beside Beyazıt Mosque, browsing through books in the Sahaflar book market, chatting with booksellers of his acquaintance, entering into the