Free The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Page B

book; instead I wrote
The Life and Works of Ahmet the Timely
,
using all the same ideas and materials, as it was deemed more beneficial and more contributive to the politics of our institute. Was this a betrayal of my master?
    Nuri Efendi never gave me much work, and what he did passon to me he never expected me to finish right away. There was never any need to rush. He was the proprietor of time. He’d spend it as he wished, and, to a certain extent, he gave the same privilege to the people around him. More than anything, he had accepted me as an avid listener. From time to time he’d say, “Hayri, my son. I cannot say if you’ll ever become a fine watchmaker. Of course I’d be the first to wish you such good fortune, for you’ll be sure to face grave problems in the future if you don’t fully commit yourself to a profession early on. But as the humble image of the Great Creator, you lack the fortitude to endure this life and everything it will thrust upon you. Only work can save you, and it’s a shame that you lack the necessary focus for this kind of work.” Then to flatter me, he’d say, “Nevertheless you love watches and clocks, and you take pity on them. That is important. What’s more, you’re a good listener. Of that I am sure. You know how to listen, and that is a rare talent. If nothing else, it masks one’s shortcomings and elevates one to the level of an interlocutor!”
    Every year Nuri Efendi published an almanac. Toward the end of November, he would begin compiling the material, transferring a large part of the almanac from the previous year, so by the middle of February it would be ready for me to take to the printer in Nuruosmaniye. I would watch in awe as the work unfolded before my very eyes: the months from both Arabic and Gregorian calendars; other divisions of time and years, from elsewhere, that were older than the seasons to which they were respectively aligned; the solar and lunar eclipses; the meticulously calculated times for morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening
prayers; the great storms and the seasonal winds, the latter, according to his calculations, no less relevant than the former; the solstices; the days scheduled to be bitterly cold or unbearably hot. Dream after dream came to life from his brass inkpot as he sat on his low divan in the small room beside the mosque, a skullcap on his head and a reed in his hand; he would line up his calculations like little grains of rice on the scrolls propped up on his right knee, and they all swirled together in a corner of the room where the light was most dimand the sound of all the watches and clocks was most concentrated, as if waiting for their time to rule the world.
    On days when he was working on his almanac, I would lose myself in a mysterious haze as I watched the miracle unfold. Knowing that the previous year’s almanac had been similarly elaborated, and that the accumulated work would embrace all the various stages of our lives, I felt myself bathed in a light born of its creator’s will, in a world rearranged by his very hand, as the passionate connection I felt to my late master was infused with a little fear.
    VI
    Among those who came to visit Nuri Efendi were Seyit Lutfullah the Mad, who lived like an owl in a dilapidated
medrese
on the hill between Vefa and Küçükpazar; Abdüsselam Bey, a Tunisian aristocrat who indulged in an extravagant lifestyle in an enormous villa with a broad ocher facade, near the Burmalı Mescit and just below the Sehzade Mosque; the hunter Nasit Bey, who lived behind the Halveti dervish lodge in Hırkaiserif; and the pharmacist Aristidi Efendi, a Christian of modest repute who managed his apothecary in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Vezneciler.
    Abdüsselam Bey was a wealthy, exuberant man whose entire tribe lived with him in his villa of some twenty or thirty rooms. The house had an uncanny way of trapping anyone who