Free A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

summer. Particularly in recent days, his sleep had been disrupted. The few hours that he could sleep with difficulty passed in eerie, nightmarish dreams, and he woke from his slumber even more tired. Worst of all was the difficulty he had maintaining his train of thought. As each idea inched forward, it became a vision of agony. Today even, as he walked down the street, he realized he was spontaneously making hand gestures. During such times Mümtaz’s companions suggested that he was trying to purge himself of certain paradoxical thoughts through actions and terse mutterings.
    He examined the volumes, recalling again the May morning of a year ago. Summer flourished within him like an apocalypse. Next came the days he believed had poisoned his entire life, including Nuran’s exasperation, his own fears and anxieties, and his feeble and exhausting insistence, each with its particular memories and moods. He knew he couldn’t stay here any longer. But he couldn’t stand, either. All he could do was gaze about as if asking whether a more excruciating form of this torment was to come.
    The bookseller raised his eyes from the manuscript: “The outlook is pretty bleak, isn’t it?”
    Mümtaz didn’t have the wherewithal for a long conversation: “We’re tending to a sick relative at home ... It’s been a week now that I haven’t been able to read a newspaper properly.” He was lying. It wasn’t that he hadn’t read the paper. He’d just lost the strength to contemplate the news. Without even forming any opinions, he simply memorized chronologies of events as if learning a lesson by rote. Interpreting, not to mention discussing, incidents that occurred in such rapid succession was an exercise in futility.
    They’d talked for years already anyway. Everybody, everywhere, at every opportunity, for years, had discussed this possibility. All variety of opinion had been expressed and all eventualities explored. Now all of humanity faced a reality of horrendous proportions.
    “I don’t know if you’ve seen the banks? They’ve been packed full for days now.” As if it had just occurred to him, he asked, “Who’s sick?”
    “İhsan.”
    The shopkeeper shook his head: “He hasn’t stopped in for quite some time. It isn’t just coincidental then. I hope he regains his health soon.” He was visibly upset, but he didn’t ask about the illness. Mümtaz mused, I guess he considers this a family secret. As if to explain that a person without troubles didn’t exist, the shopkeeper said: “Both our children were called up.” He sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I’m at a loss. My brother-in-law fell from a horse back home and cracked his ribs ... My wife’s in such a state.”
    Mümtaz knew from firsthand experience about the endless sympathy of men who wanted to console others through tales of woe.
    “Don’t worry, things will improve, it’ll all get better,” Mümtaz said as he left.
    These were among the stock expressions that he’d learned from a past generation. Maybe for this reason, with a curious stubbornness, he’d been reluctant to use them for years. But now, in the presence of this man’s misery, they came to the tip of his tongue. One civilization’s philosophy of everyday life, he thought. Each experience invites one of another variety. That means our heritage not only contains miseries and sorrows but also consolations and methods of perseverance . . .
    Çadırcılar Street was bewildering as always. On the ground before a shop whose grate usually remained shuttered, waiting for who knows what, were a Russian-made samovar spigot, a doorknob, the remnants of a lady’s mother-of-pearl fan so much the fashion thirty years ago, a few random parts belonging perhaps to a largish clock or gramophone, together with some oddities that had ended up here without breaking or crumbling to pieces somehow. A traditional coffee grinder of yellow brass and a cane handle made of deer antler were