At the heart of this book there is a dream I’d had before I ever started writing and drawing in these notebooks. I have managed to make sense of some parts of the dream, but others I still don’t understand.
I was watching the dream unfold as if it were the view outside my window when I suddenly woke up, afraid … To help me understand that dreamscape, I have arranged the illustrated pages of this book not in CHRONOLOGICAL but in EMOTIONAL order.
Morning: the city is covered in snow. It’s sticking. Even on our balcony, it’s thirty or forty centimeters thick. Ash is sleeping in the other room. I am inside my novel. I have been reading a great deal about Ottoman telegraph offices. I’ve bought so many books lately! A snowy hush reigns over the house and the city. It’s still falling, so visibility is low. And I have to confess: I am so happy. About the house, about the snow, about Ash sleeping inside, etc. etc. I am hopeful that I won’t get into any more trouble, that I will be able to live in Istanbul, and that everything will be wonderful, just like this snow. My interview with La Repubblica has been published with the headline “Terrorism Must Not Become an Excuse to Undermine Democracy.” Marco sent it to me.
The snow and the cold are really striking. That greenish snowy blue … The color of the sea. The snow falling in tiny flakes. My protagonist, the Major, has now arrived at the Telegraph Office … Now I’m writing about the history of the telegraph service. It’s great fun. But slow going. Ash keeps going up and down between here and flat 16: in the SNOW, the city is quiet. Thanks to the snow, I have been able to step back, if only for a day, from the dreadful political situation we find ourselves in. In the evening a walk with Nuri on our tail –> out on the icy snowy streets … We had to wade through freezing puddles in the Taksim Square. Ash’s feet froze. The streets are cold, no tourists or anyone else around. It’s just us, the people of Istanbul. The metro isn’t too busy either. We got off at Etiler. Sevket, Yesim, Zeynep: who is looking for a job as she finishes her Ph.D. at Harvard … Sevket also talking about politics. None of us had anticipated this imperious, foam-at-the-mouth rhetoric, this terrifying Orwellian atmosphere of authoritarianism! We hadn’t expected it to happen so soon …
In the morning, snow again. Falling in huge flakes. As Ash sleeps and the day only just begins to break, I sit at my desk and write a detailed description of the telegraph coup. I am perfectly content. In fact I can just about admit to myself: the feeling of inwardness brought about by SNOWFALL, that feeling of being left to ourselves, is a kind of comfort. In ISTANBUL, we find comfort in the beauty of snow.
Orhan Pamuk is the author of twelve novels, the memoir Istanbul, three works of nonfiction, and two photography books, and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Memories of Distant Mountains will be published by Knopf on November 24, 2024.
