The Ministry of Story

Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, Scotland

17 April 1976

“I thought of the beautiful cool evening, how I long to be walking in it outside this cell.

All of this took place while I sat in the semi-dark reading a book.

The thoughts on freedom were only momentary but so powerful that they seem to tear my soul apart.

There is something about being alone in a cell, about the inability to rise from a chair, open a door and speak to someone.

I would like to get up this minute and discuss this subject with someone.

I would like to put these feelings into a piece of sculpture and although sitting typing out the feelings is important there is a tremendous amount of strain and frustration attached to it.

During these periods I find it hard to read a book or watch TV, which I hardly do anyway.

The only solution is to tackle the mood and try to do something about it.“

(Jimmy Boyle)

Above: Jimmy Boyle, Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, Scotland

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Wednesday 17 April 2024

Above: Sazova Park, Eskişehir, Türkiye

Jimmy Boyle is a Scottish former gangster and convicted murderer who became a sculptor and novelist after his release from prison.

In 1967, Boyle (23) was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of another gangland figure, William “Babs” Rooney.

He served 14 years before his release in 1980. 

Boyle has always denied killing Rooney, but has acknowledged having been a violent and sometimes ruthless moneylender from the Gorbals, one of the roughest and most deprived areas of Glasgow.

During his incarceration in the special unit of Barlinnie Prison, he turned to art, with the help of the special unit’s art therapist, Joyce Laing.

Above: Jimmy Boyle

He wrote an autobiography, A Sense of Freedom (1977), which was later turned into a film of the same name. 

In 1980, while still in prison, Boyle married psychiatrist Sara Trevelyan.

In 2017, Trevelyan wrote Freedom Found, a book about her 20-year marriage to Boyle.

In an interview after her book’s publication, she stated that she had never felt unsafe with him. 

Upon his release from prison on 26 October 1981, he moved to Edinburgh to continue his artistic career.

He designed the largest concrete sculpture in Europe called “Gulliver” for the Craigmillar Festival Society in 1976.

Above: “Gulliver“, Edinburgh, Scotland

In 1983, Boyle set up the Gateway Exchange with Trevelyan and artist Evlynn Smith:

A charitable organisation offering art therapy workshops to recovering drug addicts and ex-convicts.

Though the project secured funding from private sources (including actor Sean Connery, comedian Billy Connolly and John Paul Getty), it lasted only a few years.

In 1994, his son James, a drug addict, was murdered in the Oatlands neighbourhood of Glasgow.

Boyle has published Pain of Confinement: Prison Diaries (1984) and a novel, Hero of the Underworld (1999).

The latter was adapted for a French film, La Rage et le Rêve des Condamnés (The Anger and Dreams of the Condemned), which won the best documentary prize at the Fifa Montréal awards in 2002.

He also wrote a novel, A Stolen Smile, which is about the theft of the Mona Lisa and how it ends up hidden on a Scottish housing scheme.

Clearly our Jimmy has led an interesting life, but is his life an interesting story?

Above: Jimmy Boyle

From the cursory bio that Wikipedia provides it seems that Jimmy never studied literature at some fancy university.

That being said, he is a published diarist and novelist.

He somehow had to learn how to write.

A person can learn how to write, because I am still learning.

Jimmy wasn’t doomed to be just an ex con.

He learned craft, things that worked for him, that he could understand and use right away.

Craft can be taught and with diligence and practice, I, you, everybody, can improve our writing.

To break through with this thing called craft, you will need to be your own disciplinarian.

James Scott Bell recommends what it takes to learn:

1. Get motivated.

Write a statement of purpose, one that gets you excited.

“Today I resolve to take writing seriously, to keep going and never stop, to learn everything I can and make it as a writer.“

Put it on your wall where you can see it every day.

Come up with your own item of visual motivation.

(During my first Christmas here in Eskişehir our staff “Christmas” party had a Secret Santa arrangement where we would receive a gift from someone anonymously and give one in return to someone else anonymously.

Through the wonders of Photoshop, a colleague created a montage of me standing with Charles Dickens in front of the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa beneath the caption “A Tale of Two Legends“.

That my colleague felt that I could be (one day) comparable to Dickens remains a great motivation for me.)

Above: Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

Go to bookstores and browse.

Look at the author’s pictures and bios.

Read their openings.

And think:

“I can do this!“

Find some ritual that gets your creative juices flowing.

Don’t waste it.

Turn it into words on a page.

2. Try stuff.

Try out what you learn, see if you get it and try some more.

Take the time to digest what you learn and then apply what you learn to your own writing.

3. Stay loose.

Write freely and rollickingly.

4. First get it written, then get it right.

“Let the world burn through you.

Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”

(Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury)

5. Set a quota.

Writing is how you learn to write.

Writing daily, as a discipline, is the best way to learn.

Most successful writers make a word goal and stick to it.

The daily writing of words, once it becomes a habit, will be the most fruitful discipline of your writing life.

You will be amazed at how productive you will become and how much you will learn about the craft.

“I only write when I am inspired.

I make sure I am inspired every morning at 9 a.m.“

(Peter DeVries)

Above: American writer Peter De Vries (1910 – 1993)

6. Don’t give up.

The main difference between successful writers and unsuccessful writers is persistence.

There are legions of published novelists who went years and years without acceptance.

They continued to write because that is what they were inside:

Writers.

KEEP WRITING.

“When first we mean to build, we first survey the plot, then draw the model.”

(Henry IV, Part 2, William Shakespeare)

Above: William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

Plot happens.

But does it work?

Does it connect with readers?

What is this story about?

Is anything happening?

Why should you keep reaading?

Why should you care?

The what happens is your plot.

When you get right down to it, there is something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudgiıng whatever real world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next.

It is especially satisfying to surrender to an author who is utterly in command of a thrilling and original story, an author capable of playing us like fish, of letting us get worried, then riled up, then complacent and then finally blowing us away when the final shocks are delivered.

While glorious prose is a fine thing, without an enthralling story, it is just so much verbal tapioca.

What the reader seeks is an experience that is other.

Other than what he normally sees each day.

Story is how he gets there.

A good story transports the reader to a new place via experience.

Not through arguments or facts, but through the illusion that life is taking place on the page.

Not the reader’s life.

Someone else’s.

Your characters’ lives.

An author creates a dream.

When we dream, we experience that as reality.

In reality there is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel:

Great storytelling.

Can creative writing be taught?

No.

Can the love of language be taught?

No.

Can a gift for stroytelling be taught?

No.

But….

Like most writers, you learn to write by writing and by reading books.

Writers learn by reading the work of their predecessors and counterparts.

They study meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes.

Above: Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 18)

Above: Bust of Greek poet Homer (8th century BC)

Above: Bust of Greek playwright Aristophanes (446 – 386 BC)

They hone their prose by absorbing the sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

Above: French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

Above: English writer / lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

And who could ask for better teachers?

Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal, methodical way – Harry Crews has described taking apart a Graham Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered, how Greene handled pacing and tone and point of view – the truth is that this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis.

Above: English writer Graham Greene (1904 – 1991)

For example, copying out long passages of a great writer’s work, you will notice that your own work should become, however briefly, just a little more fluent.

In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and re-read the authors I have most loved.

I read for pleasure, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information conveyed, how the writer structured their plot, created characters, employed detail and dialogue.

Writing, like reading, is done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time, putting every word on trial for its life.

Writers learn that which cannot be taught.

Writers learn to write by practice, hard work, repeated trial and error, success and failure.

And from the books they admire.

My blog is a sort of a “what-happened-on-this day” creation.

I like to focus on the birthdays of other writers or mention what holiday is being commemorated on this day.

Imagine we are about to be plunged into a story – any story in the world.

The curtain rises.

The cinema darkens.

We turn to the first paragraph of a novel.

The narrator utters the timeless formula:

“Once upon a time…“

John Ford (17 April 1586 – 1639) was an English playwright and poet born in Ilsington in Devon, England.

His plays deal mainly with the conflict between passion and conscience.

Although remembered primarily as a playwright, he also wrote a number of poems on themes of love and morality.

Above: English writer John Ford

Ford is best known for the tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), a family drama with a plot line of incest.

The play’s title has often been changed in new productions, sometimes being referred to as simply Giovanni and Annabella — the play’s leading, incestuous brother-and-sister characters.

In a 19th-century work it is coyly called The Brother and Sister. 

Shocking as the play is, it is still widely regarded as a classic piece of English drama.

It has been adapted to film at least twice: 

• My Sister, My Love (Sweden, 1966)
• ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Belgium, 1978).

On the face of it, so limitless is the human imagination and so boundless the realm of the storyteller’s command, we think that literally anything could happen next…

His plays deal with conflicts between individual passion and conscience and the laws and morals of society at large. 

Ford had a strong interest in abnormal psychology that is expressed through his dramas.

While virtually nothing is known of Ford’s personal life, one reference suggests that his interest in melancholia may have been more than merely intellectual.

“Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat,

With folded arms and melancholy hat.”

(Choice Drollery, Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth)

The story will have a hero or heroine or both, a central figure or figures on whose fate our interest in the story ultimately rests.

Someone with whom we can identify.

The Laws of Candy is set in Crete — “Candy” and “Candia” being archaic names for the island.

In Ford’s fictional Candy, two unusual laws are in the statute books.

One is a (highly impracticable) law against ingratitude:

A citizen who is accused of ingratitude by another, and fails to make amends, can be sentenced to death.

The second law holds that after a military victory, the soldiers will select the one of their number who has done the most to achieve the success.

“Tell us, pray, what devil this melancholy is, which can transform men into monsters.“

(The Lover’s Melancholy, John Ford)

The second law is the cause of the play’s conflict.

The forces of Candy have just won a great victory over the invading Venetians.

(Historically, Venice conquered Crete in the early 13th century [1209 – 1217] and ruled the island until 1669, though with many rebellions by the local populace.)

The commander of the army, Cassilanes, the leading soldier of his generation, expects to receive the acclaim of the troops, and is incensed to find that he has a rival in his own son, Antinous, who has distinguished himself in his first battle.

The father’s concern is real:

Antinous wins the approval of the soldiers.

Paradoxically, Cassilanes is even more outraged when Antinous claims his reward from the state — and names a bronze statue of his father.

To Cassilanes, this is only one more assertion of the son’s assumed power.

Above: Island of Crete, Greece

“Melancholy is not, as you conceive, indisposition of body, but the mind’s disease.“

(The Lover’s Melancholy, John Ford)

Cassilanes is certainly an irascible old man — but he has an additional grievance.

He has mortgaged his estates to pay the troops, who otherwise would not have fought.

The state is in no hurry to rectify the matter.

The owner of the mortgage is Gonzalo, an ambitious Venetian lord.

Gonzalo is the play’s Machiavellian villain.

He plots and manipulates with the goal of becoming both the King of Candy and the Duke of Venice.

Gonzalo, however, makes two mistakes.

One is that he takes a young Venetian prisoner of war, Fernando, into his confidence, relying on their shared nationality.

When Cassilanes retreats to a poverty-stricken retirement, Gonzalo arranges for Fernando to live in the general’s little household to further his machinations.

Fernando is a noble young man, in mind as well as in birth.

Once he falls in love with Cassilanes’ daughter Annophel, he reveals Gonzalo’s plots.

Above: Location of the island of Crete (Kriti) (in red)

“Green indiscretion, flattery of greatness,
Rawness of judgement, wilfulness in folly,
Thoughts vagrant as the wind, and as uncertain.“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

Gonzalo’s second mistake is to fall in love himself, with the Princess Erota.

The play’s list of dramatis personae describes her as “a Princess, imperious, and of an overweaning Beauty“.

Royal, rich, witty, and beautiful, she is also extravagantly vain.

She is loved by many men, including a Prince of Cyprus named Philander, but scorns them all.

Until, that is, she meets Antinous and falls in love with him.

Motivated by that love, she manipulates the vain Gonzalo into selling her Cassilanes’ mortgage and also into committing his plots and plans to writing.

Above: Map of Crete

“Love is the tyrant of the heart.

It darkens reason, confounds discretion, deaf to counsel.

It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.“

(The Lover’s Melancholy, John Ford)

In the play’s final climactic scene, the other odd law of Candy comes into play.

Cassilanes comes before the Senate with a complaint of ingratitude against his son.

Antinous, resigned to death, refuses to defend himself.

But Erota makes a similar complaint of ingratitude against Cassilanes — which provokes Antinous to make the same complaint against her, in a sort of round-robin festival of egomania.

The solution to this tangle comes when Annophel enters and makes her own complaint of ingratitude against the Senate of Candy, for its treatment of her father.

Above: Firkas fortress in Chania, Crete, Greece

“Glories of human greatness are but pleasing dreams and shadows soon decaying.“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

The befuddled Senate turns the matter over to the Cypriot prince Philander for judgment.

Philander prevails on Cassilanes to repent and withdraw his complaint against Antinous, which allows all the subsequent difficulties to be resolved.

Almost as an afterthought, the Cretans and Venetians unite in condemning Gonzalo to punishment.

Erota’s pride is humbled (we know this, since she tells us so herself), and she accepts her most constant (and noble) suitor, Prince Philander, as her spouse.

Above: Venetian harbour in Chania, Crete, Greece

“The joys of marriage are Heaven on Earth,
Life’s Paradise, great princess, the soul’s quiet,
Sinews of concord, earthly immortality,
Eternity of pleasures, no restoratives
Like to a constant woman!“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

In The Witch of Edmonton, Elizabeth Sawyer is a poor, lonely, and unfairly ostracized old woman, who turns to witchcraft after having been unjustly accused of it, having nothing left to lose.

A talking devil-dog Tom (performed by a human actor) appears, becoming her familiar and only friend.

With Tom’s help, Sawyer causes one of her neighbours to go mad and kill herself, but otherwise she does not achieve very much, since many of those around her are only too willing to sell their souls to the Devil all by themselves.

The play is divided fairly rigidly into separate plots, which only occasionally intersect or overlap.

Alongside the main story of Elizabeth Sawyer, the other major plotline is a domestic tragedy centering on the farmer’s son Frank Thorney.

Frank is secretly married to the poor but virtuous Winnifride, whom he loves and believes is pregnant with his child, but his father insists that he marry Susan, elder daughter of the wealthy farmer Old Carter.

Frank weakly gives in to a bigamous marriage but then tries to flee the county with Winnifride disguised as his page.

When the doting Susan follows him, he stabs her.

At this point, the witch’s dog Tom is present on stage.

It is left ambiguous whether Frank remains a fully responsible moral agent in the act.

Frank inflicts superficial wounds on himself, so that he can pretend to have been attacked.

He attempts to frame Warbeck, Susan’s former suitor, and Somerton, suitor of Susan’s younger sister Katherine.

While the kindly Katherine is nursing her supposedly incapacitated brother-in-law, however, she finds a bloodstained knife in his pocket and immediately guesses the truth, which she reveals to her father.

The devil-dog is on stage again at this point, and “shrugs for joy” according to the stage direction, which suggests that he has brought about Frank’s downfall.

“Tempt not the stars, young man.

Thou canst not play with the severity of fate.”

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

Frank is executed for his crime at the same time as Mother Sawyer, but he, in marked contrast to her, is forgiven by all.

The pregnant Winnifride is taken into the family of Old Carter.

The play thus ends on a relatively happy note — Old Carter enjoins all those assembled at the execution:

“So, let’s every man home to Edmonton with heavy hearts, yet as merry as we can, though not as we would.“

“Revenge proves its own executioner.“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

The note of optimism is also heard in the play’s other main plot, centering on the Morris dancing yokel Cuddy Banks, whose invincible innocence allows him to emerge unscathed from his own encounters with the dog Tom.

He eventually banishes the dog from the stage with the words:

“Out and avaunt!“

“He hath shook hands with time.“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

Despite the optimism of the play’s ending it remains clear that the execution of Mother Sawyer has done little or nothing to purge the play’s world of an evil to which its inhabitants are only too ready to turn spontaneously.

Firstly, the devil-dog has not been destroyed.

Indeed it resolves to go to London and corrupt souls there.

Secondly, the village’s voice of authority, the lord of the manor Sir Arthur Clarington, is represented as untrustworthy.

Mother Sawyer utters a lengthy tirade indicting his lechery – He had previously had an affair with Winnifride, which she now repents – and general corruption:

A charge which the play as a whole supports.

We are introduced to our central figure(s) in an imaginary world.

The general scene is set.

“Once upon a time…“

We are taken out of our present place and time into an imaginary realm where the story is to unfold.

We are introduced to our central figure(s).

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

The Witch of Edmonton may be very ready to capitalize on the sensational story of a witch, but it does not permit an easy and comfortable demonization of her.

It presents her as a product of society rather than an anomaly in it.

Something happens.

Some event, some encounter, precipates the story’s action, giving it a focus.

“Once upon a time there was Someone living Somewhere.

Then one day Something happened.”

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

The plot of The Fair Maid of the Inn concerns the intertwined fortunes of two prominent Florentine families.

Alberto is the Admiral of Florence.

He is married to Mariana.

Their children are Cesario and Clarissa.

Baptista, another old sailor, is a friend of Alberto, and father of Mentivole.

Like their fathers, Cesario and Mentivole are friends.

Alberto’s is a stable nuclear family.

Mariana is a doting mother, especially in regard to Cesario.

Baptista’s situation is less happy:

Fourteen years earlier, he, a widower in his prime, contracted a secret marriage with Juliana, a niece of the Duke of Genoa.

After a short three months of contentment, the Genoese Duke discovered the marriage, exiled Baptista, and sequestered Juliana.

He has not seen her since.

We meet a little boy called Aladdin, who lives in a city in China.

One day a sorcerer arrives and leads him out of the city to a mysterious cave.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

This situation is delineated in the play’s long opening scene.

At the scene’s opening, Cesario warns Clarissa to safeguard her virginity and her reputation, but Clarissa responds by reproving her brother about his rumoured affair with Biancha, the 13-year-old daughter of a local tavernkeeper.

(She’s the “fair maid” of the title.)

Cesario protests that his connection with the girl is above reproach:

Biancha, he says, is beautiful but chaste.

By the scene’s close, Mentivole expresses his love for Clarissa.

She responds positively and gives him a diamond ring as a token of her affection and commitment.

We meet the Scottish General Macbeth, who has just won a great victory over his country’s enemies.

Then, on his way home, he encounters mysterious witches.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

Friends though they are, Cesario and Mentivole have a falling-out over a horse race.

They quarrel, lose their tempers and draw their swords to fight.

They are separated by other friends, but only after Cesario is wounded.

The affair escalates into a major feud between the two families.

Alberto is called away by his naval duties and is soon reported dead.

Mariana fears that her son will be killed in the feud.

To prevent this, she announces (falsely) to the Duke and his court that Cesario is not really Alberto’s son.

Early in their marriage, she maintains, Alberto had wanted an heir, but the couple did not conceive.

Mariana exploited her husband’s absences at sea to pass off a servant’s child as her own.

Thus he is no longer Alberto’s son and safe from Baptista’s enmity.

But the Duke sees the injustice done against Cesario and decrees that the now-widowed Mariana should marry the young man and endow him with three-quarters of Alberto’s estate.

The remaining share will serve as Clarissa’s dowry.

We meet a girl called Alice, wondering how to amuse herself in the summer heat.

Suddenly she sees a white rabbit running past and vanishing down a mysterious hole.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

Cesario is amenable to this arrangement — but Mariana assures him that any marriage between them will never be consummated.

Cesario proposes a marriage between himself and Clarissa, though both women reject the idea out of hand.

And even Biancha turns against Cesario, when she comes to understand that he is not serious about marrying her.

Eventually matters are set right when Alberto returns to Florence.

Not dead, he was instead captured by the Turks, but rescued by Prospero, a captain in the service of Malta.

Prospero is an old friend of both Alberto and Baptista.

He is able to inform the world of the fate of Juliana, and the daughter that Alberto didn’t know Baptista had.

She is Biancha, the supposed daughter of the tavernkeeper.

This good news allows the compounding of all the previous difficulties.

The quarrel between Alberto and Baptista is resolved.

Cesario is restored to his rightful place as Alberto’s son.

Cesario and Biancha can marry, as can Mentivole and Clarissa.

Above: Firenze (Florence), Italia (Italy)

We see the great detective Sherlock Holmes sitting in his Baker Street lodgings.

Then there is a knock at the door.

A visitor enters to present him with his next case.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

The play has a comic subplot centered on Biancha, her supposed parents the Host and Hostess of the tavern, and their quests.

The comedy features a mountebank (a charlatan) and his clownish assistant, and their victims.

An event, a summons, provides the call to action which will lead the hero out of their initial state into a series of adventures or experiences which will transform their lives.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

The play’s storytelling is rough and rather inconsistent, most likely due to the multiple hands involved in its authorship.

The action the hero is drawn into will involve conflict and uncertainty, because without conflict and uncertainty there is no story.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

In The Queen, Alphonso, the play’s protagonist, is a defeated rebel against Aragon.

He has been condemned to death and is about to be executed.

The Queen of Aragon (otherwise unnamed) intercedes at the last moment and learns that Alphonso’s rebellion is rooted in his pathological misogyny.

The prospect of being ruled by a woman was too much for him to bear.

The Queen is struck with love at first sight.

She is, in her way, just as irrational as Alphonso is in his.

The Queen pardons Alphonso and marries him.

Alphonso requests a seven-day separation, to enable him to set aside his feelings against women.

The Queen grants his request.

The week extends to a month and the new King still avoids his Queen.

The intercession of her counsellors, and even her own personal appeal, make no difference.

In a bitter confrontation, Alphonso tells the Queen:

“I hate thy sex.

Of all thy sex, thee worst.“

The story carries us towards some kind of resolution.

Every story which is complete, and not just a fragmentary string of episodes and impressions, must work up to a climax, where conflict and uncertainty are usually at their most extreme.

Every story leads its central character in one of two directions.

Either they end happily with a sense of liberation, fulfilment and completion.

Or they end unhappily in some form of discomfiture, frustration or death.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

One man, however, sees a solution to the problem.

The psychologically sophisticated Muretto half-counsels, half-manipulates Alphonso into a more positive disposition toward the Queen.

Muretto praises the Queen’s beauty to Alphonso and simultaneously arouses his jealousy by suggesting that she is sexually active outside her marriage.

Muretto functions rather like a modern therapist to treat Alphonso’s psychological imbalance.

The psychological manipulation works, in the sense that Alphonso begins to value the Queen only after he thinks he has lost her to another man.

To say that stories either have happy or unhappy endings may seem such a commonplace that one almost hesitates to utter it, but it has to be said, because it is the most important single thing to be observed about stories.

Around that one fact, around what is necessary to bring a story to some sort of an ending, revolves the whole of their extraordinary significance in our lives.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

Yet with two such passionate individuals, reconciliation cannot come easily.

Alphonso condemns the Queen to death.

She can be reprieved only if a champion comes forth to defend her honour by meeting the king in single combat.

The Queen, however, is determined to bow to her husband’s will no matter the price and demands that all her followers swear they will not step forward in her cause.

Aristotle first observed that a satisfactory story – a story which is a “whole” – must have “a beginning, a middle and an end“.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

The play’s secondary plot deals with the love affair of the Queen’s General Velasco, the valiant soldier who defeated Alphonso, and the widow Salassa.

Velasco has the opposite problem from Alphonso:

He idealises his love for Salassa, terming her “the deity I adore“.

He allows her to dominate their relationship.

(Velasco’s friend and admirer Lodovico has a low opinion of Salassa, calling her a “frail commodity“, a “paraquetto“, a “wagtail“.)

Salassa indulges in her power over Velasco by asking him to give up all combat and conflict, or even wearing a sword and defending his reputation, for a period of two years.

When he agrees, Velasco finds that he quickly loses his self-respect and the regard of others.

He regains those qualities only when he steps forward as the Queen’s champion, ready to meet the King on the field of honour.

There are tragic stories, stories in which the hero’s fortunes usually begin by rising, but eventually “turn down” to disaster.

(The Greek word catastrophe means literally a “down stroke“, the downturn in the hero’s fortunes at the end of a tragedy.)

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

Before the duel can take place, however, the assembled courtiers protest the proceeding.

Muretto steps forward to explain his role in manipulating Alphonso’s mind.

Finally, Alphonso is convinced of the Queen’s innocence and repents his past harshness.

Their rocky relationship reaches a new tolerance and understanding.

A humbled Salassa also resolves to give up her vain and selfish ways to be a fit wife for Velasco.

There are comedies, stories in which things initially seem to become more and more coomplicated for the hero, until they are entangled in a complete knot, from which there seems to be no escape, but eventually comes the peripeteia, the reversal of fortune.

The knot is miraculously unravelled (from which we get the French word denouement, an “unknotting“.

The hero is liberated.

We and all the world rejoice.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

The play’s comic relief is supplied by a group of minor characters – two quarrelling followers of Alphonso, the astrologer Pynto and a bluff captain named Bufo, plus Velasco’s servant Mopas and the matchmaker/bawd Madame Shaparoon.

The plot of a story leads its hero either to a catastrophe or to a denouement, to frustration or liberation, to death or a new lease on life.

(The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker)

In ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Giovanni, recently returned to Parma from university in Bologna, has developed an incestuous passion for his sister Annabella and the play opens with his discussing this ethical problem with Friar Bonaventura.

Bonaventura tries to convince Giovanni that his desires are evil despite Giovanni’s passionate reasoning and eventually persuades him to try to rid himself of his feelings through repentance.

Above: Parma, Italy

“Nice philosophy may tolerate unlikely arguments, but Heaven admits no jest.“

(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford)

Annabella, meanwhile, is being approached by a number of suitors including Bergetto, Grimaldi, and Soranzo.

She is not interested in any of them.

Giovanni finally tells her how he feels (obviously having failed in his attempts to repent) and finally wins her over.

Annabella’s tutoress Putana (“Whore“) encourages the relationship.

The siblings consummate their relationship.

“I have spent many a silent night in sighs and groans, ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate, reasoned against the reasons of my love, done all that smoothed-cheek Virtue could advise, but found all bootless:

‘Tis my destiny that you must either love or I must die.“

(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford)

Hippolita, a past lover of Soranzo, verbally attacks him, furious with him for letting her send her husband Richardetto on a dangerous journey she believed would result in his death so that they could be together, then declining his vows and abandoning her.

Soranzo leaves and his servant Vasques promises to help Hippolita get revenge on Soranzo and the pair agree to marry after they murder him.

“Delay in vengeance gives a heavier blow.“

(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford)

Richardetto is not dead but also in Parma in disguise with his niece Philotis.

Richardetto is also desperate for revenge against Soranzo and convinces Grimaldi that to win Annabella, he should stab Soranzo with a poisoned sword.

Bergetto and Philotis, now betrothed, are planning to marry secretly in the place Richardetto orders Grimaldi to wait.

Grimaldi mistakenly stabs and kills Bergetto instead, leaving Philotis, Poggio (Bergetto’s servant), and Donado (Bergetto’s uncle) distraught.

“There is a place, in a black and hollow vault, where day is never seen.

There shines no sun, but flaming horror of consuming fires – a lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs of an infected darkness.

In this place dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts of never-dying deaths.“

(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford)

Annabella resigns herself to marrying Soranzo, knowing she has to marry someone other than her brother.

She subsequently falls ill and it is revealed that she is pregnant.

Friar Bonaventura then persuades her to marry Soranzo before her pregnancy becomes apparent.

Donado and Florio (father of Annabella and Giovanni) go to the Cardinal’s house, where Grimaldi has been in hiding, to beg for justice.

The Cardinal refuses due to Grimaldi’s high status and instead sends him back to Rome.

Florio tells Donado to wait for God to bring them justice.

“Why, I hold fate clasped in my fist and could command the course of Time’s eternal motion, hadst thou been one thought more steady than an ebbing sea.”

(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford)

Annabella and Soranzo are married soon after.

Their ceremony includes masque dancers, one of whom reveals herself to be Hippolita.

She claims to be willing to drink a toast with Soranzo and the two raise their glasses and drink, on which note she explains that her plan was to poison his wine.

Vasques comes forward and reveals that he was always loyal to his master and he poisoned Hippolita.

She dies spouting insults and damning prophecies to the newlyweds.

Seeing the effects of anger and revenge, Richardetto abandons his plans and sends Philotis off to a convent to save her soul.

“There’s not a hair sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet, it sinks me to the grave:

I must creep thither.

The journey is not long.“

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

When Soranzo discovers Annabella’s pregnancy, the two argue until Annabella realises that Soranzo truly did love her and finds herself consumed with guilt.

She is confined to her room by her husband, who plots with Vasques to avenge himself against his cheating wife and her unknown lover.

On Soranzo’s exit, Putana comes onto the stage and Vasques pretends to befriend her to gain the name of Annabella’s baby’s father.

Once Putana reveals that it is Giovanni, Vasques has bandits tie Putana up and put out her eyes as punishment for the terrible acts she has willingly overseen and encouraged.

In her room, Annabella writes a letter to her brother in her own blood, warning him that Soranzo knows and will soon seek revenge.

The Friar delivers the letter, but Giovanni is too arrogant to believe he can be harmed and ignores advice to decline the invitation to Soranzo’s birthday feast.

The Friar subsequently flees Parma to avoid further involvement in Giovanni’s downfall.

“Love is dead.

Let lovers’ eyes locked in endless dreams, th’ extreme of all extremes, ope no more, for now Love dies.”

(The Broken Heart, John Ford)

On the day of the feast, Giovanni visits Annabella in her room and after talking with her, stabs her during a kiss.

He then enters the feast, at which all remaining characters are present, wielding a dagger on which his sister’s heart is skewered and tells everyone of the incestuous affair.

Florio dies immediately from shock.

Soranzo attacks Giovanni verbally and Giovanni stabs and kills him.

Vasques intervenes, wounding Giovanni before ordering the bandits to finish the job.

Following the massacre, the Cardinal orders Putana to be burnt at the stake, Vasques to be banished, and the Church to seize all the wealth and property belonging to the dead.

Richardetto finally reveals his true identity to Donado and the play ends with the cardinal saying of Annabella:

“Who could not say,

‘Tis pity she’s a whore?“.

“Fly hence, shadows, that do keep,
Watchful sorrows, charmed in sleep.“

(The Lover’s Melancholy, John Ford)

The Lady’s Trial employs the multiple-plot structure that is typical of Ford and common in the dramas of the era.

The main plot concerns Auria, an aristocrat of Genoa, and his marriage to the beautiful and virtuous but lowly-born Spinella.

Auria’s marriage across class lines is controversial among other Genoese nobles, like his friend Aurelio.

When Auria announces that he is going off to the wars against the Turks to repair his fortunes – Spinella brought no dowry – Aurelio opposes the move on two counts:

Spinella will be exposed to temptations.

The role of soldier of fortune is unbecoming to a nobleman.

Auria replies that he trusts his wife and that he would rather stand on his own than depend on his friends.

The contrast is drawn between the two men:

Aurelio is rule-bound and conventional, while Auria is more independent in his judgments.

“He is a noble gentleman; withal
Happy in his endeavours: the general voice
Sounds him for courtesy, behaviour, language,
And every fair demeanour, an example:
Titles of honour add not to his worth;
Who is himself an honour to his title.“

(The Lady’s Trial, John Ford)

Aurelio is right in one respect:

Spinella is exposed to temptation in her husband’s absence.

The nobleman Adurni tries to seduce Spinella, though he is so convincingly repulsed that he reforms and abandons his lustful ways.

Spinella’s reputation is compromised, however, when Aurelio exposes their meeting.

Even when Adurni confesses his transgression and apologizes to the returned husband, the scandal comes to a head in a formal trial of Spinella (“the lady’s trial” of the title).

The trial allows Spinella to exonerate herself and prove to the world, and to aristocratic Genoese society, her honour and virtue.

Auria accepts Adurni’s repentance as sincere and chooses the path of reason over violent retribution.

Adurni in turn takes Spinella’s sister Castanna as his bride, as a seal of their reconciliation.

“Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear;
The sweetest freedom is an honest heart.”

(The Lady’s Trial, John Ford)

The secondary plot involves the divorced couple Benatzi and Levidolche.

Levidolche has been seduced by Adurni.

Benatzi seeks to catch her in the act by wooing her in disguise — but Levidolche recognizes him and decides to reform.

But she tries to manipulate Benatzi into taking revenge on Adurni — an attempt that fails comically.

“We can drink till all look blue.“

(The Lady’s Trial, John Ford)

The third level, the comic subplot, deals with the Amoretta, a comical young lady with a lisp who has an obsession with horses.

She is pursued by two ridiculous suitors.

Firstly Guzman, a Spanish soldier with breath smelling of garlic and herring and Fulgoso a good looking but rather dim witted Dutchman who whistles constantly.

The two would-be suitors are encouraged by Futelli and Piero for the pairs own amusement.

Through various hilarious failed attempts by the two foreigners, the play is provided some much needed comic relief.

Amoretta eventually marries the vermin-like Futelli.

“A bachelor may thrive by observation, on a little.

A single life’s no burden, but to draw in yokes is chargeable and will require a double maintenance.“

(The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, John Ford)

The play ends with four marriages.

In a pattern typical of the comic genre, everyone has learned his or her lesson.

In Auria, Ford’s portrayal of a husband who “responds rationally to the rumour of his wife’s infidelity” provides a bold departure from, and a stark contrast to, earlier figures in English Renaissance drama like Othello, as well as the precedents of Ford’s own earlier plays.

“Sister, look ye, how, by a new creation of my tailor’s I’ve shook off old mortality.”

(The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, John Ford)

Thornton Niven Wilder (17 April 1897 – 1975) was an American playwright and novelist.

He won three Pulitzer Prizes for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a US National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

Above: American writer Thornton Wilder

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.“

(The Woman of Andros, Thornton Wilder)

Wilder began writing plays while at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual.

According to a classmate:

“We left him alone, just left him alone.

And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference.”

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.“

(TIME magazine, 12 January 1953, Thornton Wilder)

After graduating, Wilder went to Italy and studied archaeology and Italian (1920 –1921) as part of an eight-month residency at the American Academy in Rome.

He then taught French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, beginning in 1921.

His first novel, The Cabala, was published in 1926.

In 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought him commercial success and his first Pulitzer Prize (1928).

He resigned from the Lawrenceville School in 1928.

From 1930 to 1937 he taught at the University of Chicago, during which time he published his translation of André Obey’s own adaptation of the tale “Le Viol de Lucrece” (1931) under the title “Lucrece“. 

In Chicago, he became famous as a lecturer and was chronicled on the celebrity pages. 

Above: University of Chicago shield

In 1938 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town.

He won the Prize again in 1943 for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.

“Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks.

The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.“

(The New York Mirror, 13 July 1956, Thornton Wilder)

Above: Thornton Wilder

He went on to be a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he served for a year as the Charles Eliot Norton professor.

Though he considered himself a teacher first and a writer second, he continued to write all his life, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1957 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.

“The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope.“

(Thornton Wilder)

Above: Frank Kraven as The Stage Manager in Our Town

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them.

Philosophically, the book explores the question of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem “innocent” or “undeserving“.

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928.

In 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

“For my reading I have chosen the final words of The Bridge of San Luis Rey written by Thornton Wilder in 1927.

It is about a tragedy that took place in Peru, when a bridge collapsed over a gorge and five people died.

“A witness to the deaths, wanting to make sense of them and explain the ways of God to his fellow human beings, examined the lives of the people who died, and these words were said by someone who knew the victims, and who had been through the many emotions, and the many stages, of bereavement and loss.

But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left Earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.

But the love will have been enough.

All those impulses of love return to the love that made them.

Even memory is not necessary for love.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love.

The only survival, the only meaning.“

(The Guardian, Friday 21 September 2001, Tony Blair)

Above: Tony Blair

Since then its popularity has grown enormously. 

The book is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events before the disaster.

The first few pages of the first chapter explain the book’s basic premise:

The story centers on a fictional event that happened in Peru on the road between Lima and Cuzco, at noon on Friday 20 July 1714.

A rope bridge woven by the Inca a century earlier collapsed at that particular moment, while five people were crossing it, sending them falling from a great height to their deaths in the river below. 

The collapse was witnessed by Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar who was on his way to cross the bridge himself.

A deeply pious man who seeks to provide some sort of empirical evidence that might prove to the world God’s Divine Providence, he sets out to interview everyone he can find who knew the five victims.

Over the course of six years, he compiles a huge book of all of the evidence he gathers to show that the beginning and end of a person is all part of God’s plan for that person.

Part One foretells the burning of the book that occurs at the end of the novel, but it also says that one copy of Brother Juniper’s book survives and is at the library of the University of San Marcos, where it now sits neglected.

Part Two focuses on one of the victims of the collapse:

Doña María, the Marquesa de Montemayor.

The daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant, the Marquesa was an ugly child who eventually entered into an arranged marriage and bore a daughter, Clara, whom she loved dearly.

Clara was indifferent to her mother, though, and became engaged to a Spanish man and moved across the ocean to Spain where she married.

Doña María visits her daughter in Spain, but when they cannot get along, she returns to Lima.

The only way that they can communicate comfortably is by letter.

Doña María pours her heart into her writing, which becomes so polished that her letters will be read in schools in the centuries after her lifetime.

“Love is an energy which exists of itself.

It is its own value.“

(TIME magazine, 3 February 1958, Thornton Wilder)

Doña María takes as her companion Pepita, a girl raised at the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas.

When she learns that her daughter is pregnant in Spain, Doña María decides to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santa María de Cluxambuqua to pray that the baby will be healthy and loved.

Pepita goes along as company and to supervise the staff.

When Doña María is out at the shrine, Pepita stays at the inn and writes a letter to her patron, the Abbess María del Pilar, complaining about her misery and loneliness.

Doña María sees the letter on the table when she gets back and reads it.

Later, she asks Pepita about the letter.

Pepita says she tore it up because the letter was not brave.

Doña María has new insight into the ways in which her own life and love for her daughter have lacked bravery.

She writes her “first letter” (actually Letter LVI) of courageous love to her daughter, but two days later, returning to Lima, she and Pepita are on the bridge of San Luis Rey when it collapses.

“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest.

Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.”

(Thornton Wilder)

Esteban and Manuel are twins who were left at the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas as infants.

The Abbess of the convent, Madre María del Pilar, developed a fondness for them as they grew up.

When they became older, they decided to be scribes.

They are so close that they have developed a secret language that only they understand.

Their closeness becomes strained when Manuel falls in love with Camila Perichole, a famous actress.

“Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.“

(The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder)

Perichole flirts with Manuel and swears him to secrecy when she retains him to write letters to her lover, the Viceroy.

Esteban has no idea of their relationship until she turns up at the twins’ room one night in a hurry and has Manuel write to a matador with whom she is having an affair.

Esteban encourages his brother to follow her, but instead Manuel swears that he will never see her again.

Later, Manuel cuts his knee on a piece of metal and it becomes infected.

The surgeon instructs Esteban to put cold compresses on the injury:

The compresses are so painful that Manuel curses Esteban, though he later remembers nothing of his curses.

Esteban offers to send for the Perichole, but Manuel refuses.

Soon after, Manuel dies.

“Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.“

(The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder)

When the Abbess comes to prepare the body, she asks Esteban his name and he says he is Manuel.

Gossip about his ensuing strange behavior spreads all over town.

He goes to the theatre but runs away before the Perichole can talk to him.

The Abbess also tries to talk to him, but he runs away, so she sends for Captain Alvarado.

“Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.”

(Thornton Wilder)

Captain Alvarado, a well-known sailor and explorer, goes to see Esteban in Cuzco and hires him to sail the world with him, far from Peru.

Esteban agrees, then refuses, then acquiesces if he can get all his pay in advance to buy a present for the Abbess before he departs.

That night Esteban attempts suicide but is saved by Captain Alvarado.

The Captain offers to take him back to Lima to buy the present.

At the ravine spanned by the bridge of San Luis Rey, the Captain goes down to a boat that is ferrying some materials across the water.

Esteban goes to the bridge and is on it when it collapses.

“I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists.

I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.“

(The New York Times, 6 November 1961, Thornton Wilder)

Uncle Pio acts as Camila Perichole’s valet, and, in addition, “her singing-master, her coiffeur, her masseur, her reader, her errand-boy, her banker.

Rumour added: her father.”

He was born the bastard son of a Madrid aristocrat and later travelled the world engaged in a wide variety of dubious, though legal, businesses, most related to being a go-between or agent of the powerful, including (briefly) conducting interrogations for the Inquisition.

His life “became too complicated” and he fled to Peru.

He came to realize that he had just three interests in the world:

• independence
• the constant presence of beautiful women
• the masterpieces of Spanish literature, particularly those of the theatre

“Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor – Look at their houses! Look at their clothes – could really suffer.

Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.“

(The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder)

He finds work as the confidential agent of the Viceroy of Peru.

One day, he discovers a 12-year-old café singer, Micaela Villegas, and takes her under his protection.

Over the course of years, as they travel from tavern to tavern throughout Latin America, she grows into a beautiful and talented young woman.

Uncle Pio instructs her in the etiquette of high society and goads her to greatness by expressing perpetual disappointment with her performances.

She develops into Camila Perichole, the most honoured actress in Lima.

“99% of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.“

(The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder)

After many years of success, the Perichole becomes bored with the stage.

The elderly Viceroy, Don Andrés, takes her as his mistress.

She and Uncle Pio and the Archbishop of Peru and, eventually, Captain Alvarado meet frequently at midnight for dinner at the Viceroy’s mansion.

Through it all, Uncle Pio remains faithfully devoted to her, but as Camila ages and bears three children by the Viceroy she focuses on becoming a lady rather than an actress.

She avoids Uncle Pio.

When he talks to her she tells him to not use her stage name.

“Money is like manure.

It is not worth a thing unless it is spread around encouraging young things to grow.“

(The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder)

When a smallpox epidemic sweeps through Lima, Camila is disfigured by it.

She takes her young son Don Jaime, who suffers from convulsions, to the country.

Uncle Pio sees her one night trying hopelessly to cover her pockmarked face with powder.

Ashamed, she refuses to ever see him again.

He begs her to allow him to take her son to Lima and teach the boy as he taught her.

Despairing at the turn her life has taken, she reluctantly agrees.

Uncle Pio and Jaime leave the next morning.

They are the 4th and 5th people on the bridge of San Luis Rey when it collapses.

“Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men’s bodies.

As the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.“

(The Lover’s Melancholy, John Ford)

Brother Juniper labors for six years on his book about the bridge collapse, talking to everyone he can find who knew the victims, trying various mathematical formulas to measure spiritual traits, with no results beyond conventionally pious generalizations.

He compiles his huge book of interviews with complete faith in God’s goodness and justice, but a council pronounces his work heretical.

The book and Brother Juniper are publicly burned for their heresy.

“Imagination draws on memory.

Memory and imagination combined can stage a servants’ ball or even write a book, if that’s what they want to do.”

(Theophilus North, Thornton Wilder)

The story then shifts back in time to the day of a funeral service for those who died in the bridge collapse.

The Archbishop, the Viceroy and Captain Alvarado are at the ceremony.

At the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas, the Abbess feels, having lost Pepita and the twin brothers, that her work to help the poor and infirm will die with her.

A year after the accident, Camila Perichole seeks out the Abbess to ask how she can go on, having lost her son and Uncle Pio.

Camila gains comfort and insight from the Abbess.

It is later revealed she becomes a helper at the Convent.

Later, Doña Clara arrives from Spain, also seeking out the Abbess to speak with her about her mother, the Marquesa de Montemayor.

She is greatly moved by the work of the Abbess in caring for the deaf, the insane and the dying.

The novel ends with the Abbess’ observation:

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.“

Wilder wrote Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

It was inspired in part by Dante’s Purgatorio and in part by his friend Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans.

Above: Italian writer Dante Aligheri (1265 – 1321)

Above: American writer Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)

Wilder suffered from writer’s block while writing the final act. 

Our Town employs a choric narrator called the Stage Manager and a minimalist set to underscore the human experience.

Wilder himself played the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions.

Following the daily lives of the Gibbs and Webb families, as well as the other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, the play illustrates the importance of the universality of the simple, yet meaningful lives of all people in the world in order to demonstrate the value of appreciating life.

The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.

“Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.”

(Our Town, Thornton Wilder)

The Stage Manager introduces the audience to the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire and the people living there as a morning begins in the year 1901.

Joe Crowell delivers the paper to Doc Gibbs, Howie Newsome delivers the milk, and the Webb and Gibbs households send their children (Emily and Wally Webb, George and Rebecca Gibbs) off to school on this beautifully simple morning.

Professor Willard speaks to the audience about the history of the town.

Editor Webb speaks to the audience about the town’s socioeconomic status, political and religious demographics, and the accessibility and proliferation, or lack thereof, of culture and art in Grover’s Corners.

The Stage Manager leads us through a series of pivotal moments throughout the afternoon and evening, revealing the characters’ relationships and challenges.

“That’s what it was to be alive.

To move about in a cloud of ignorance.

To go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you.

To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.

To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. 

Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to.

Ignorance and blindness.“

(Our Town, Thornton Wilder)

It is at this time when we are introduced to Simon Stimson, an organist and choir director at the Congregational Church.

We learn from Mrs. Louella Soames that Simon Stimson is an alcoholic when she, Mrs. Gibbs, and Mrs. Webb stop on the corner after choir practice and “gossip like a bunch of old hens“, according to Doc Gibbs, discussing Simon’s alcoholism.

It seems to be a well known fact amongst everyone in town that Simon Stimson has a problem with alcohol.

All the characters speak to his issue as if they are aware of it and his having “seen a peck of trouble” a phrase repeated by more than one character throughout the show.

While the majority of townsfolk choose to “look the other way“, including the town policeman, Constable Warren, it is Mrs. Gibbs who takes Simon’s struggles with addiction to heart, and has a conversation with her husband, Doc Gibbs, about Simon’s drinking.

“Nurse one vice in your bosom.

Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it.

Then you’ll have the miser who is no liar and the drunkard who is the benefactor of the whole city.“

(The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder)

Underneath a glowing full moon, Act I ends with siblings George and Rebecca, and Emily gazing out of their respective bedroom windows, enjoying the smell of heliotrope in the “wonderful (or terrible) moonlight” with the self-discovery of Emily and George liking each other, and the realization that they are both straining to grow up in their own way.

“The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.“

(Thornton Wilder interview, Writers at Work)

The audience is dismissed to the first intermission by the Stage Manager who quips:

“That’s the end of Act I, folks.

You can go and smoke, now.

Those that smoke.”

“I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. 

I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. 

But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious.

The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.“

(Thornton Wilder interview, Writers at Work)

Three years have passed.

George and Emily prepare to wed.

The day is filled with stress.

Howie Newsome is delivering milk in the pouring rain while Si Crowell, younger brother of Joe, laments how George’s baseball talents will be squandered.

George pays an awkward visit to his soon-to-be in-laws.

Here, the Stage Manager interrupts the scene and takes the audience back a year, to the end of Emily and George’s junior year.

Emily confronts George about his pride.

Over an ice cream soda, they discuss the future and confess their love for each other.

George decides not to go to college, as he had planned, but to work and eventually take over his uncle’s farm.

In the present, George and Emily say that they are not ready to marry — George to his mother, Emily to her father — but they both calm down and happily go through with the wedding.

“A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George.

All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way.“

(Our Town, Thornton Wilder)

Nine years have passed.

The Stage Manager, in a lengthy monologue, discusses eternity, focusing attention on the cemetery outside of town and the people who have died since the wedding, including Mrs. Gibbs (pneumonia, while travelling), Wally Webb (burst appendix, while camping), Mrs. Soames and Simon Stimson (suicide by hanging).

Town undertaker Joe Stoddard is introduced, as is a young man named Sam Craig who has returned to Grover’s Corners for his cousin’s funeral.

That cousin is Emily, who died giving birth to her and George’s second child.

Once the funeral ends, Emily emerges to join the dead.

Mrs. Gibbs urges her to forget her life, warning her that being able to see but not interact with her family, all the while knowing what will happen in the future, will cause her too much pain.

Ignoring the warnings of Simon, Mrs. Soames and Mrs. Gibbs, Emily returns to Earth to relive one day, her 12th birthday.

She joyfully watches her parents and some of the people of her childhood for the first time in years, but her joy quickly turns to pain as she realizes how little people appreciate the simple joys of life.

The memory proves too painful for her and she realizes that every moment of life should be treasured.

When she asks the Stage Manager if anyone truly understands the value of life while they live it, he responds:

“No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”

Emily returns to her grave next to Mrs. Gibbs and watches impassively as George kneels weeping over her.

The Stage Manager concludes the play and wishes the audience a good night.

“I can’t. 

I can’t go on.

It goes so fast.

We don’t have time to look at one another.

I didn’t realize. 

So all that was going on and we never noticed.

Take me back — up the hill — to my grave.

But first:

Wait!

One more look.

Good-bye, Good-bye, world.

Good-bye Grover’s Corners – Mama and Papa.

Good-bye to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers.

And food and coffee.

And new ironed dresses and hot bath and sleeping and waking up. 

Oh, Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Every, every minute? 

I’m ready to go back.

I should have listened to you.

That’s all human beings are!

Just blind people.“

(Our Town, Thornton Wilder)

His play The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on 18 November 1942, featuring Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead.

Again, the themes are familiar:

• the timeless human condition
• history as progressive, cyclical, or entropic
• literature, philosophy, and religion as the touchstones of civilization

Three acts dramatize the travails of the Antrobus family, allegorizing the alternate history of mankind.

It was claimed by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, that much of the play was the result of unacknowledged borrowing from James Joyce’s last work.

“The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”

(Thornton Wilder interview, Writers at Work)

Act One is an amalgam of early 20th century New Jersey and the dawn of the Ice Age.

The father is inventing things such as the lever, the wheel, the alphabet and multiplication tables.

The family and the entire northeastern US face extinction by a wall of ice moving southward from Canada.

The story is introduced by a narrator and further expanded by the family maid, Sabina.

There are unsettling parallels between the members of the Antrobus family and various characters from the Bible.

In addition, time is compressed and scrambled to such an extent that the refugees who arrive at the Antrobus house seeking food and fire include the Old Testament prophet Moses, the ancient Greek poet Homer, and women who are identified as Muses.

“I hate this play and every word in it.“

(The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder)

Act II takes place on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the Antrobuses are present for George’s swearing-in as president of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans.

Sabina is present, also, in the guise of a scheming beauty queen, who tries to steal George’s affection from his wife and family.

The conventioneers are rowdy and party furiously, but there is an undercurrent of foreboding as a fortune teller warns of an impending storm.

The weather soon transforms from summery sunshine to hurricane to deluge.

Gladys and George each attempt their individual rebellions and are brought back into line by the family.

The act ends with the family members reconciled and, paralleling the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark, directing pairs of animals to safety on a large boat where they survive the storm and the end of the world.

“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate — that’s my philosophy.“

(The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder)

The final act takes place in the ruins of the Antrobuses’ former home.

A devastating war has occurred.

Maggie and Gladys have survived by hiding in a cellar.

When they come out of the cellar we see that Gladys has a baby.

Sabina joins them, “dressed as a Napoleonic camp-follower“.

George has been away at the front lines leading an army.

Henry also fought, on the opposite side, and returns as a general.

The family members discuss the ability of the human race to rebuild and continue after continually destroying itself.

The question is raised:

“Is there any accomplishment or attribute of the human race of enough value that its civilization should be rebuilt?“

The stage manager interrupts the play-within-the-play to explain that several members of their company can’t perform their parts, possibly due to food poisoning (as the actress playing Sabina saw blue mold on the lemon meringue pie at dinner).

The stage manager drafts a janitor, a dresser and other non-actors to fill their parts, which involve quoting philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle to mark the passing of time within the play.

The alternate history action ends where it began, with Sabina dusting the living room and worrying about George’s arrival from the office.

Her final act is to address the audience and turn over the responsibility of continuing the action, or life, to them.

“I have never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle.

I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it is a field, or a home, or a country.“

(The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder)

In his novel The Ides of March (1948), Wilder reconstructed the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Above: Roman general / statesman Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC)

He had met Jean-Paul Sartre on a US lecture tour after the war.

He was under the influence of existentialism, although rejecting its atheist implications.

Above: French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)

“Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.”

(Thornton Wilder interview, Writers at Work)

In 1962 and 1963, Wilder lived for 20 months in the small town of Douglas, Arizona, apart from family and friends.

There he started his longest novel, The Eighth Day, which went on to win the National Book Award.

According to Harold Augenbraum in 2009, it “attacked the big questions head on, embedded in the story of small-town America“.

“It is only in appearance that time is a river.

It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

During a weekend gathering of the Ashley and Lansing families, Breckenridge Lansing is shot while the men are practicing shooting.

Townsfolk suspect that Eustacia Lansing, Breckenridge’s wife, and John Ashley were having an affair.

Ashley is tried, convicted, and sentenced to execution.

Miraculously, days before the scheduled execution, he is rescued by mysterious masked men.

He then escapes to Chile, where he assumes the identity of a Canadian named James Tolland and finds work in the copper mining industry.

“Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipient of confidences.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

While Ashley escapes to Chile, his family — left destitute without his income — turns to running a boarding house to make ends meet.

His son, Roger, assumes a fake name and moves to Chicago.

After working a series of odd jobs, Roger makes a name for himself as a writer for a newspaper.

Ashley’s daughter, Lily, also assumes a fake name and becomes a famous singer in Chicago, later moving to New York.

“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous.

It is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

At the end of the book, it is revealed that a group of Native Americans, one of whom was friends with Roger, is responsible for helping Ashley escape his execution.

The group did this because, after a flood wiped out their local church, Ashley loaned them money to rebuild it.

It is also revealed that Ashley did not kill Lansing.

Lansing’s son George did, because Lansing was becoming violent towards his wife, George’s mother.

George feared for his mother’s safety, and consequently killed his father and then ran away to San Francisco, and later Russia, to work as an actor.

“A sense of humour judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongrous.

It dampens enthusiasm.

It mocks hope.

It pardons shortcomings.

It consoles failure.

It recommends moderation.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

Though there is a murder mystery in the novel, the main focus of the work is the history of the Ashley and Lansing families.

Wilder muses frequently on the nature of written history throughout the book.

Towards the end, he writes:

“There is only one history.

It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished.

All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions — makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entireties.

The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and a brief passage of time from that enormous tapestry.

Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against the injustice, against the imposture.“

Above: Thornton Wilder

The book concludes with a number of flash-forwards describing the rest of the lives of the characters.

Ashley’s wife, Beata, moves to Los Angeles and starts a boarding house there.

Roger marries one of Lansing’s daughters.

Ashley’s daughter Sophia suffers from dementia and moves into a sanitarium.

Ashley’s daughter Constance becomes a political activist and moves to Japan.

“We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

His last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973.

It was made into the film Mr. North in 1988.

In 1920s Newport, Rhode Island, Theophilus North is an engaging, multi-talented middle class Yale University graduate who spends the summer catering to the wealthy families of the city.

He becomes the confidant of James McHenry Bosworth, and a tutor and tennis coach to the families’ children.

He also befriends many from the city’s servant class including Henry Simmons, Amelia Cranston and Sally Boffin.

“Man is not an end but a beginning.

We are at the beginning of the second week.

We are the children of the eighth day.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

Complications arise when some residents begin to ascribe healing powers to the static electricity shocks that Mr. North happens to generate frequently.

Despite never claiming any healing or medical abilities, he is accused of quackery and with the help of those he had befriended must defend himself.

In the end, Mr. North accepts a position of leadership at an educational and philosophical academy founded by Mr. Bosworth and begins a romance with Bosworth’s granddaughter Persis.

“When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery.

He wants him to know all that being alive can bring.

That is His best gift.

There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.”

(The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder)

Donald Richie (17 April 1924 – 2013) was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan and, especially, Japanese cinema.

Richie was a prolific author.

Above: Donald Richie

Among his most noted works on Japan are The Inland Sea, a travel classic, and Public People, Private People, a look at some of Japan’s most significant and most mundane people.

The Inland Sea is nearly a land-locked body of water bounded by three of Japan’s four major islands.

It has been called “the Aegean of the East“, bounded as it is by the Honshu mainland on one side and the various lands of the Japanese archipelago on the other.

The people who live with the Seto Naikai, a name meaning “the sea within the straits”, remain isolated from each other and from the mainland.

The travels are real.

The chronology is real.

The people are real.

The places are all real.

They are there in the Inland Sea, within easy reach of the enterprising traveller.

The history and folklore are also real.

One’s thoughts about Japan tend to be contradictory.

And this is fitting in a land where mutual contradictions are entertained with no seeming inconvenience.

Consistency is no great virtue.

Indeed, the quite consistent is the quite dead.

We must all remember that for the Westerner, Japan is a great mirror.

In it we can see the land and the people clearly – but we can also see ourselves.

“I hear that they are building a bridge

To the island of Tsu

Alas…

To what now

Shall I compare myself?”

(Old Japanese poem)

He compiled two collections of essays on Japan: 

• A Lateral View 
• Partial Views

A collection of his writings has been published to commemorate 50 years of writing about Japan: 

• The Donald Richie Reader 
• The Japan Journals: 1947–2004 consists of extended excerpts from his diaries

Cynthia Ozick (born 17 April 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

Ozick’s fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes about politics, history, and literary criticism.

In addition, she has written and translated poetry.

Above: Cynthia Ozick

“She thought:

How hard it is to change one’s life.

And again she thought:

How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

(Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick)

Henry James occupies a central place in her fiction and nonfiction.

The critic Adam Kirsch wrote that her “career-long agon with Henry James reaches a kind of culmination in Foreign Bodies, her polemical rewriting of ‘The Ambassadors‘ “.

Above: American author Henry James (1843 – 1916)

“Sometimes starting is so difficult, because it is all chaos.

It is the difference between writing an essay, which if it is about Henry James, at least you know that much, but with fiction you don’t.

It could be a scene in your mind or it could be some kind of tendril that you can barely define.

So I have to force it.

And then after – this is real compulsion, real self-flagellation – it kind of takes off.

But there is a lot of agony before.

And sometimes during.

And sometimes all through.

But just before the end and revelations start coming, that’s the joy.

But mostly that’s Hell.”

(The Guardian, 4 July 2011, Cythnia Ozick)

Above: Cynthia Ozick

The Holocaust and its aftermath is also a dominant theme.

Above: “Selection” of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, around May 1944. Jews were sent either to work or to the gas chamber. 

For instance in “Who Owns Anne Frank?” she writes that the diary’s true meaning has been distorted and eviscerated “by blurb and stage, by shrewdness and naiveté, by cowardice and spirituality, by forgiveness and indifference“. 

Above: German Jewess diarist Anne Frank (1929 – 1945)

“I don’t think one writes for immortality.

I think beginning writers always think they will have fame.

But if fame – which is power – is what you want, then you will get it, probably.

But it is not something necessary to want or need.“

(NPR, 17 July 2016, Cynthia Ozick)

Above: Logo of National Public Radio

Much of her work explores the disparaged self, the reconstruction of identity after immigration, trauma and movement from one class to another.

Above: Cynthia Ozick

“I think the word is intractable.

I blame the lack of live and let live.

And which side is ıt coming from more than the other side?

I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels.

That’s how it strikes me.”

(The Guardian, 4 July 2011, Cynthia Ozick)

Ozick says that writing is not a choice but “a kind of hallucinatory madness.

You will do it no matter what.

You can’t not do it.”

She sees the “freedom in the delectable sense of making things up” as coexisting with the “torment” of writing.

Above: Cynthia Ozick

“I cannot not write.

I mean, what else am I going to do with my life?

That’s another way of putting it.

I simply must.

Writers cannot help themselves.

In a way they are sort of like the Queen of England.

Every writer is doomed to their profession.

What else is the Queen going to do with her life?

She was born a Queen.

She’s stuck.

And writers are stuck, too.“

(NPR, 17 July 2016, Cythnia Ozick)

Above: Cynthia Oznick

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) is the second book and first collection of stories published by American author Cynthia Ozick. 

“I always knew that this was what I wanted to do.

I think this is true of most writers — especially anybody who has read ‘Little Women’, which is every writer.

Not so much the male writers, let’s admit it, but every writer who grows up has wanted to be Jo.“

(NPR, 17 July 2016, Cynthia Ozick)

Above: Cythnia Ozick

The Pagan Rabbi is about a rabbi who had just committed suicide by hanging himself in a public park.

He is remembered by his widow for having recently discovered a passion for nature and his widow felt that he left his beliefs of Judaism for Paganism.

Envy is about an American Yiddish poet who is bitterly jealous of his more-successful contemporary.

The main character also has a personal vendetta against televangelists who are attempting to convert Jews to Christianity.

The Suitcase is about a retired Imperial German fighter pilot, whose son is a well-recognized artist.

One of the artist’s friends finds that her purse has been stolen, and they try to figure out who stole it.

The woman who lost her purse accuses the father of the artist, because he was in the Imperial German army.

The Butterfly and the Traffic Light is basically an argument between a college girl and her professor about how traffic lights are the icons of American cities.

The Shawl follows Rosa, her baby Magda, and her niece Stella on their march to a Nazi concentration camp in the middle of winter.

They are described as weak and starving during the march.

Stella’s knees are described as “tumors on sticks“.

Rosa is said to be a “walking cradle” because she constantly carries Magda close to her chest wrapped in her shawl.

Rosa contemplates handing Magda off to one of the villagers watching their march, but decides that the guards would most likely just shoot them both.

Rosa says the shawl is “magic” when Magda sucks on it because it sustained Magda for three days and three nights without food.

Stella observes that Magda looks Aryan, but Rosa sees the observation as some kind of threat to Magda.

At the camp, Rosa continues to hide Magda, but is in constant fear that someone will discover and kill her.

“If you’re alone too much, you think too much.”, Persky said.

“Without a life, a person lives where they can.

If all they got is thoughts, that’s where they live.”, Rosa answered

(The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick)

One day, Stella takes Magda’s shawl away to warm herself.

Without her shawl, Magda, who hadn’t made a sound since the march, begins screaming for her “Ma“.

Rosa hears the screaming, but does not run to Magda because the guards will kill them both.

Instead, she runs to get the shawl and begins waving it in the hope that Magda will see it and calm down.

She is too late and watches as the Nazi guards pick Magda up and throw her into the electric fence, killing her.

Rosa stuffs the shawl into her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

“This is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin.”

“Cramped,” Rosa said.

“I work from a different theory.

For everything, there’s a bad way of describing, also a good way.

You pick the good way, you go along better.”

“I don’t like to give myself lies.

Life is short.

We all got to lie.”, Rosa said.

(The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick)

Ozick was inspired to write The Shawl by a line in the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.

The book mentioned a real event, a baby being thrown into an electric fence.

Ozick was struck by the brutality of the death camp and felt inspired to write about that event.

“Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.“

(The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick)

Nick Hornby (born 17 April 1957) is an English writer and lyricist.

He is best known for his memoir Fever Pitch (1992) and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all of which were adapted into feature films.

Hornby’s work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.

His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2018. 

In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Hornby was named the 29th most influential person in British culture.

He has received two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for An Education (2009), and Brooklyn (2015).

Prior to his career as a novelist, Hornby worked for a time as a secondary-school English teacher.

Above: Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch, published in 1992, is an autobiographical story detailing his fanatical support for Arsenal Football Club. 

“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.“

(Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby)

It consists of several chapters in chronological order, from the time the author first became a football fan as a child until his early 30s.

Each chapter is about a football match that he remembers watching, most but not all at Arsenal Stadium, Highbury, and how it related to the events that were going on with his life.

“By the early 70s I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.“

Above: Flag of England

As well as recounting Arsenal’s highs and lows, Hornby talks about other football clubs that play in London, and his interest in the contrasting surroundings of Cambridge United and Cambridge City, whose matches he attends while at university.

“As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.“

(Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby)

As a result, Hornby received the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

In 1997, the memoir was adapted for film in the UK, and in 2005 an American remake was released, following Jimmy Fallon’s character’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox, a baseball team.

With the book’s success, Hornby began to publish articles in the Sunday Times, Time Out and the Times Literary Supplement, in addition to his music reviews for the New Yorker.

High Fidelity — his third book and first novel — was published in 1995.

Rob Fleming is a 35-year-old man who owns a record shop in London called Championship Vinyl.

His lawyer girlfriend, Laura, has just left him and now he is going through a crisis.

At his record shop, Rob and his employees, Dick and Barry, spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics and constructing desert-island “top-five” lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music, movies, and pop culture.

Rob uses this exercise to create his own list: “The top five most memorable split-ups.”

This list includes the following ex-girlfriends:

1) Alison Ashworth

2) Penny Hardwick

3) Jackie Allen

4) Charlie Nicholson

5) Sarah Kendrew

“Where’s the superficial?

I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward.

This doesn’t seem like superficial to me.

These aren’t flesh wounds.

These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.“

(High Fidelity, Nick Hornby)

Rob, recalling these breakups, sets about getting in touch with the former girlfriends.

Eventually, Rob’s re-examination of his failed relationships, a one-time stand with an American musician named Marie LaSalle, and the death of Laura’s father bring the two back together.

Their relationship is cemented by the launch of a new purposefulness to Rob’s life in the revival of his disc jockey career.

“I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains.“

(High Fidelity, Nick Hornby)

Also, realizing that his fear of commitment (a result of his fear of death of those around him) and his tendency to act on emotion are responsible for his continuing desires to pursue new women, Rob makes a token commitment to Laura.

“Then I lost it.

Kinda lost it all, you know.

Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds.“

(High Fidelity, Nick Hornby)

The novel, about a neurotic record collector and his failed relationships, was adapted into a 2000 American film starring John Cusack, a Broadway musical in 2006, and a television show High Fidelity starring Zoë Kravitz in 2020.

His second novel, About a Boy, published in 1998, is about two “boys“ — Marcus, an awkward yet endearing adolescent from a single-parent family, and the free-floating, mid-30s Will Freeman, who overcomes his own immaturity and self-centredness through his growing relationship with Marcus.

Set in 1993 London, About a Boy features two main protagonists:

• Will Freeman, a 36-year-old bachelor
• Marcus Brewer, a 12-year-old incongruous schoolboy described as “introverted“ by his suicidal mother, Fiona, despite his tendencies to bond and interact with people.

Will’s father wrote a successful Christmas song, the royalties of which have afforded Will the ability to remain voluntarily redundant throughout his life – he spends his plentiful free time immersing himself in 1990s culture, music, and pursuing sexual relations with women.

“There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.“

(About a Boy, Nick Hornby)

After a pleasant relationship with a single mother of two, Angie, Will comes up with the idea of attending a single parents group as a new way to pick up women.

For this purpose, he invents a two-year-old son called Ned.

Will then makes a number of acquaintances through his membership of the single parents group, two of which are Fiona and her son Marcus.

Although their relationship is initially somewhat strained, they finally succeed in striking up a true friendship despite Will being largely uninterested during the early-middle stages of the novel.

Will, a socially aware and “trendy” person, aids Marcus to fit into 1990s youth culture by encouraging him not to get his hair cut by his mother, buying him Adidas trainers, and introducing him to contemporary music, such as Nirvana.

Marcus and Will’s friendship strengthens as the story progresses, even after Marcus and Fiona discover Will’s lie about having a child.

“Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of.“

(About a Boy, Nick Hornby)

Marcus is befriended by Ellie McCrae, a tough, moody 15-year-old girl, who is constantly in trouble at school because she insists on wearing a Kurt Cobain jumper.

He also spends some time with his dad Clive, who visits Marcus and Fiona for Christmas together with his new girlfriend Lindsey and her mother.

Clive has a minor accident during some D.I.Y. work and breaks his collarbone.

This prompts Clive into having “a big think” about the meaning of his life.

He summons Marcus to Cambridge to see him.

Marcus decides to bring Ellie along with him for support.

However, they are arrested on the way as Ellie smashes a shop window displaying a cardboard cut-out of Kurt Cobain – accusing the shopkeeper of “trying to make money out of him” after his suicide.

“Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before.“

(About a Boy, Nick Hornby)

Meanwhile, to Will’s despair, he falls in love with a woman called Rachel.

Rachel is a single mother with a son named Ali (Alistair), who is the same age as Marcus.

The two originally fight, but quickly become friends.

Will’s emotional faculties are liberated and he begins to “shed his old skin” of emotional indifference.

Simultaneously Marcus is becoming more typical of his age.

He begins to enjoy his life more.

“These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and … and it was too late.“

(About a Boy, Nick Hornby)

The penultimate scene takes place in a police station in Royston (a small suburban town), where nearly every significant character in the novel is present, their common link being Marcus.

The novel ends during a three-way dialogue between Marcus, Will and Fiona, where Will, to see if Marcus has truly changed, proposes the idea that he play a Joni Mitchell song on Fiona’s piano, which she is enthusiastic about.

However, Marcus responds saying he “hates” Joni Mitchell, whereby Hornby concludes the novel with the narration saying:

“Will knew Marcus would be OK“.

Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult starred in the 2002 film version.

In 1999, Hornby received the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hornby’s next novel, How to Be Good, was published in 2001.

The female protagonist in the novel explores contemporary morals, marriage and parenthood.

“What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?“

(How to Be Good, Nick Hornby)

It centers on characters Katie Carr, a doctor, and her husband, David Grant.

The story begins when David stops being “the Angriest Man In Holloway” and begins to be “good” with the help of his spiritual healer, DJ Good News (who also shows up briefly in Hornby’s A Long Way Down).

The pair go about this by nominally convincing people to give their spare bedrooms to the homeless, but as their next scheme comes around, “reversal” (being good to people one has not been good to in the past), this proves to be fruitless and thus David gives up his strivings and his plans for a book on how to be good, appropriately named “How to be Good“.

The protagonist, Katie, briefly encounters a minor character named Dick whose description and attitude towards music are reminiscent of the character of the same name from Hornby’s first novel, High Fidelity.

It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2001.

He won the W.H. Smith Award for Fiction in 2002.

“And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody.”

(How to Be Good, Nick Hornby)

Part of the money he earned with his next book, Speaking with the Angel in 2002, was donated to TreeHouse, a charity for autistic children:

Hornby’s own son is autistic.

He was editor of the book, which contained 12 short stories written by his friends.

He also contributed to the collection with the story “NippleJesus“.

“Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.“

(Songbook, Nick Hornby)

In 2003, Hornby wrote a collection of essays on selected popular songs and the emotional resonance they carry, called 31 Songs (known in the US as Songbook).

“Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to “I Got Loaded,” which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax.“

(Songbook, Nick Hornby)

A Long Way Down is a 2005 novel written by British author Nick Hornby.

It is a dark comedy, playing off the themes of suicide, angst, depression and promiscuity.

The story is written in the first-person narrative from the points of view of the four main characters, Martin, Maureen, Jess and JJ.

These four strangers happen to meet on the roof of a high building called Toppers House in London on New Year’s Eve, each with the intent of committing suicide.

Their plans for death in solitude are ruined when they meet.

The novel recounts their misadventures as they decide to come down from the roof alive – however temporarily that may be.

Disgraced TV presenter Martin Sharp, lonely single mother Maureen (51 years old), unsuccessful musician JJ and rude teenager Jess (18 years old) meet at Toppers House in London on New Year’s Eve.

They all want to commit suicide by jumping from the roof.

Their plans for death in solitude, however, are ruined when they meet.

After telling their individual stories to the others, they decide to hold off on jumping and to help each other.

Thus a group of four unfortunate and very individual people forms.

Jess’s condition not to jump is that they help her to find her ex-boyfriend Chas.

So they take a taxi and drive to the party they suppose Chas to be at.

After finding and talking to Chas they decide to go to Martin’s place where they find Penny, who has obviously been crying.

She accuses Martin of cheating on her because he had left the party they had both attended that evening without any explanation.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no disturbed mental balance here, my friend.

I’d say he got it just right.

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing.

Surely that’s fair enough?

Surely the coroner’s report should read:

“He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

The next morning Jess’s dad learns that the newspapers are publishing a story about Jess and Martin.

Jess tells him that she slept with Martin, to avoid him finding out the truth of her attempted suicide.

He takes her to task because the whole thing is very awkward for him.

He is the Junior Secretary of Education and has a reputation to lose.

He goes out to get an early edition of the paper and sees the story about her ‘suicide pact‘ with Martin, so Jess’s “whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time“.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no disturbed mental balance here, my friend.

I’d say he got it just right.

Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing.

Surely that’s fair enough?

Surely the coroner’s report should read:

“He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.“

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

Jess’s father asks Martin to clear up the accusations.

Martin denies that he slept with Jess.

After the conversation, her father asks Martin to protect Jess and gives him money.

Afterwards, a reporter calls JJ wanting to know why they decided not to jump, but JJ refuses to discuss it.

“But I’d felt as if I’d pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away.

I’d had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I had somehow managed to mislay it.

No, you see, that’s not right.

I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away.

I hadn’t mislaid it at all.

I had spent it.“

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

Later Jess calls Maureen.

They decide to organise a meeting at Maureen’s place.

At the meeting, Jess suggests that they try to profit from the suicidal-report in the newspaper.

Her idea is to confess to the press that they saw an angel who saved them from jumping.

Martin, Maureen and JJ don’t like the idea and they try to convince Jess out of talking to the press.

The next morning they find out that Jess told a reporter, Linda, that they saw an angel that looked like Matt Damon.

Jess also promised Linda an interview with Martin, Maureen and JJ.

Although they are upset with Jess’ behaviour, they decide to do the interview.

Linda uses the interview to attack Martin in the press.

Thus Martin is fired from his cable TV “Feet Up TV!”, but he receives a second chance by promising to his boss that the other three will be guests in his show.

The show is a disaster and Martin loses his job.

At another TV show Jess admits that the angel story was not true.

“And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there’s no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.“

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

Later, JJ decides that the four of them have to go on holiday for Maureen’s benefit.

Martin, Jess and JJ help Maureen to find a place for Matty, her son.

One week later they are on a plane to Tenerife.

On the second day, Jess sees a girl who looks very similar to her lost sister Jen.

Jess bothers the girl and they have a fight.

Out of frustration Jess gets drunk and the police have to take her back to the hotel.

JJ meets a girl that saw his old band and they spend the night together.

Martin decides to leave the hotel after a fight with Jess.

During his absence from the others, he thinks about his life and decides that he has made no mistakes.

He blames other people for how his life has turned out.

In the taxi to the airport they talk about their holiday and plan another meeting for Valentine’s Day.

They meet at 8 o’clock on the roof of Toppers House on Valentine’s Day.

“And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there’s no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.“

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

While they have a conversation, they see a young man who is planning to jump from the roof.

They try to stop him from committing suicide but he jumps.

They decide to go home and to meet the following afternoon at Starbucks.

“I couldn’t get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn’t changed my mind, and I still knew that I’d have to do it sometime. It’s just that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it in the next five minutes.”

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

Martin tells them about a newspaper article he read according to which people who want to commit suicide need 90 days to overcome their predicament.

So they decide to hold their decision until 31 March.

Maureen and Jess decide to visit Martin’s ex-wife Cindy to bring her back to him.

Cindy Sharp lives with her kids in Torley Heath and has a new partner Paul, whom Maureen and Jess later find out is blind.

Cindy explains to them that Martin made many mistakes and that he didn’t take care of the children.

After that, Jess organises a meeting in the basement of Starbucks.

She invites relatives of the four.

All in all, 17 people appear, but the meeting is a disaster.

Jess and her parents are screaming at each other, because her mother claims that she had stolen a pair of earrings from Jen’s untouched room.

While they are fighting Jess runs out of the Starbucks.

JJ and a former member of his band are leaving the basement to have a fight and Martin has an argument with one of Maureen’s nurses because he claims that he is flirting with Penny.

Maureen is the only one of the four who is still present.

She talks to Jess’ parents and speculates that Jen may have come back to take the earrings.

The nurses Sean and Stephen help Maureen to bring Matty home and on the way Sean asks her if she is interested in joining their quiz team.

At the quiz, an old man from the team offers Maureen a job in a newsagent’s.

When Jess comes back from her trip to London Bridge, her mother apologizes for accusing her.

Jess accepts the apology, seeing the hope Maureen’s suggestion has given her mother.

Maureen, JJ and Martin have new jobs now.

Martin is a teacher and wants to start a new life.

JJ is a busker and is happy to make music again.

Maureen has started work at the newsagent’s.

The 90 days have passed and they meet in a pub near Toppers House.

They decide to go on the roof again.

While watching the London Eye from the roof, they realise that their lives aren’t that bad.

They decide to delay their final decision on killing themselves for another six months.

“I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers’ Hose, and the coincidence was too much.

It was like a message from God.

OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, jump off a roof, but I didn’t blame Him.

What else was He supposed to tell me?“

(A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby)

Hornby’s book Slam was published on 16 October 2007.

It is his first novel for young adults and was recognised as a 2008 ALA Best Books for Young Adults.

The protagonist of Slam is a 16-year-old skateboarder named Sam, whose life changes drastically when his girlfriend gets pregnant.

The novel’s protagonist is a troubled 16-year-old skateboarder, Sam, who lives in London.

His mother, Annie, gave birth to him when she was just 16.

They therefore have an unconventional relationship.

He has a poster of Tony Hawk in his room that serves as his friend and confidant.

Sam’s two best friends are Rabbit and Rubbish, two skateboarders.

Sam’s father, Dave, is somewhat estranged from the family, visiting them only occasionally.

After being introduced to Alicia at a party thrown by Annie’s co-worker, Andrea, Sam and Alicia start dating.

He believes he is in love with her and visits her numerous times, almost daily, in which they have sex several times.

However, one time Sam and Alicia try having sex not wearing protection.

Sam knows that due to him having sex with Alicia without a condom, she might be pregnant.

He’s just not ready to be a father.

After a while, Sam gets bored of his relationship and decides to break up.

A while later, Alicia calls him to meet so they can talk. Sam, realizing what news she has, has a prophetic dream of waking up next to Alicia in the future.

She is ugly and heavy, and their baby, Roof, is loud and obnoxious.

He attends the local college occasionally throughout the week, pursuing a career in art and design.

Moreover, Annie is pregnant.

Sam awakens the next morning.

He is back to his normal time and presumes that he was sent in the future by the mystical powers of his Tony Hawk poster.

In fear of the obvious news that Alicia will give him, he runs away to Hastings and throws his mobile phone in the sea.

Thinking he can make a permanent residence there, Sam goes to several attractions, only to be told there is no work.

While in a seedy bed and breakfast, Sam meets a rude old man, Mr Brady, that hires him as a helper with various day-to-day activities (helping him up and down the stairs, and retrieving his remote control).

In the middle of the night, Mr Brady barges into his room demanding he helps him find the remote that has fallen behind his bed.

Sam grudgingly retrieves it, only to decide that he no longer wants to stay in the town.

Above: Hastings, England

He returns home to Annie who has called the police.

After spending some time with Annie, Sam and Alicia meet up and she reveals that she is in fact pregnant.

Refusing to get an abortion, Alicia and Sam work up the nerve to tell Alicia’s elitist parents, Andrea and Robert.

Originally upset, Andrea and Robert try to convince Alicia to have an abortion.

When Alicia refuses, Andrea and Robert lash out and blame Sam for ruining Alicia’s life.

Sam, Alicia, Andrea and Robert march over to Sam’s apartment, only to find Annie with her new boyfriend Mark.

When told of the pregnancy, Annie breaks down and cries, furious that Sam would ruin his life.

That night, Sam has another prophetic dream in which he takes Roof (the name, he finds, being a contraction of Rufus) to a doctor’s appointment.

Again, Sam has no idea how to take care of Roof and no idea what is going on.

Sam upsets his son Rufus, and he again, realizes he is not a suitable father.

Fortunately, he meets with a young mother – whom he does not know, but who seems to know him – and gets her to show him how to change Roof’s diapers, though she says:

“But you are very good at doing it.”

When waking up he realizes that, like it or not, he is going to have a life of taking care of his son.

Gradually, he gets used to the idea.

As soon as Mark moves into their house, Annie becomes pregnant.

Sam moves into Alicia’s house only to find that he really isn’t welcome there.

He begins to take part-time college classes.

He encounters one of Alicia’s previous boyfriends who insinuates that Sam’s son Rufus is actually his.

He confronts Alicia when he believes that she conveniently made it look like it was his child – which she angrily disproves, but the scene adds to spoiling their relationship.

He moves back into his mother’s apartment, resulting in him researching the Internet for facts about teenage pregnancies.

He discovers that four out of five male teenage parents lose contact with their children.

He goes to Alicia’s and begins to row with Alicia, resulting in her thinking he is seeing another girl.

Eventually Alicia’s parents clear the matter up.

When Alicia’s time comes, Sam is very confused, but eventually does manage in a credible way the role of being at her side.

He then finds out the origin of the baby’s name – when recovering from birth-giving Alicia was listening to Rufus Wainwright.

It was Sam himself who changed it to “Roof“.

Soon afterwards, Sam’s mother gives birth to a daughter, Emily – who is strictly Roof’s aunt, though being a month younger than him.

Sam gets involved in taking care of Emily, too.

Soon after this Sam and Alicia take Rufus out for the day with Alicia and Sam having sex later.

Alicia’s mum discovers them and gets particularly angry.

Sam and Alicia finally confirm to each other they were from the beginning wrong for each other.

Then Sam has a third prophetic dream, presumably a few years in the future.

He wakes up with a beautiful girl he doesn’t know.

It is revealed she is his current girlfriend, Alex, as Alicia and he broke up.

The two go to meet Alicia and her new boyfriend, Carl, in a restaurant.

It is made clear that Alicia is the primary caretaker of the baby, but that she and Sam still have a friendly relationship.

Hornby’s following novel, titled Juliet, Naked, was published in September 2009.

Addressing similar themes as his earlier novel High Fidelity, the book is about a reclusive 1980s rock star who is forced out of isolation, after the release of demo recordings of the songs on his most famous album brings him into contact with some of his most passionate fans.

Duncan, an obsessive music fan, receives a CD of Juliet, Naked, an album of solo acoustic demos of the songs on the album Juliet by his favourite artist, Tucker Crowe.

Duncan’s girlfriend, Annie, opens it first and listens to it on her own.

Duncan is angry, especially when she expresses her dislike for it.

He writes an enthusiastic review for the fan website he runs.

Annie writes a passionate article criticising it and receives an email response from Tucker Crowe himself. Further email correspondence ensues, much of which consumes Annie’s thoughts.

Tucker Crowe is in Pennsylvania preparing for a visit from his daughter Lizzie, whom he has never met.

He has five children from four relationships.

His youngest son Jackson and Jackson’s mother, Cat, are the only ones he lives with.

Lizzie reveals that she is visiting because she is pregnant.

Duncan meets a new colleague called Gina, whom he sleeps with.

He tells Annie of his affair and she insists he move out.

The next day Annie talks to her judgmental therapist Malcolm.

Duncan regrets leaving Annie but she refuses to take him back.

Cat breaks up with Tucker, but Tucker remains to look after Jackson.

Annie places a photo of Tucker and Jackson on her fridge and invites Duncan round to make him see it, gleeful that he doesn’t know the significance of it, and tells him she is in a relationship with him.

She ponders the years she has wasted with Duncan and ends up going to the pub with her friend Ros.

She meets Gav and Barnesy, two Northern Soul dancers.

Barnesy comes back to her house and tells her he loves her, but leaves after she says she won’t sleep with him.

Annie discusses the incident the next day with Malcolm.

Tucker learns that Lizzie has lost the baby.

He and Jackson fly to London to see Lizzie.

On arrival at the hospital in London, Tucker has a heart attack and is admitted.

Lizzie invites all his children and their mothers to visit for a family reunion.

A mini-narrative describes the events which caused Tucker to end his career after hearing that he had a daughter, Grace, from the relationship before/during Juliet.

Annie visits him in the hospital.

He suggests staying at her house to avoid the family reunion.

The next day Annie visits again.

Annie discovers he had not yet met with Grace.

Tucker tells her about Grace and Juliet.

Annie insists he call his family.

They discuss his work.

Tucker sees it as inauthentic rubbish, while Annie thinks it is deep and meaningful music while clarifying that while the music is good, it doesn’t mean that Tucker as a person is good.

She also admits that she was in a relationship with Duncan, whom Tucker knows of from the website.

Annie encourages Tucker to meet Duncan, but he refuses.

The next day, they bump into Duncan.

Tucker introduces himself, but Duncan doesn’t believe him.

After considering it, Duncan comes over.

Tucker shows Duncan his passport as proof.

They have tea together.

Tucker clarifies some of Duncan’s beliefs about him, while Duncan expresses his love of his music.

Grace calls Tucker.

She says she understands how he and she can’t be close because it would mean giving up Juliet.

An exhibition Annie has been working on opens at the Gooleness Museum, where she works as a curator.

She suggests that Tucker could open it, but the councillor in charge says he’s never heard of him and invites Gav and Barnsey to do it instead.

At the party, Annie admits to Tucker that she likes him romantically.

Afterwards they have sex.

Annie says she has used a contraceptive, but she hadn’t.

Tucker and Jackson return to America.

Annie tells Malcolm about it all and tells him that she would like to sell her house and move right away to America to join Tucker and Jackson.

Malcolm’s paternalistic comment make her realise that she needs to leave England.

In the epilogue, Duncan and other fans review on the fan website a new release from Tucker, which they think is terrible.

One of them writes ‘Happiness Is Poison‘.

Only one new member says she and her husband love the new album, while they find Juliet too gloomy for their liking.

In 2010, Hornby co-founded the Ministry of Stories, a non-profit organisation in East London dedicated to helping children and young adults develop writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

 

This blog has its own missions.

I have been advised by my wife (Ute) and my social media mentor (Emir) that I should consider reducing the size of my blogposts, that we live in an ADD (attention disorder deficit) society that is both unwilling and unable to read for any extended length of time.

But the length of my posts, including this one, is to fight against this feeling.

This post’s goal is simple.

I want you to read.

Whether or not you intend to be a writer or simply long for good writing to read.

These days it is impossible to get away from discussions of whether the book will survive the digital revolution.

Blogs, tweets and newspaper articles on the subject appear daily, many of them repetitive, most of them admitting ignorance of the future.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo put these famous words into the mouth of Archdeacon Claude Frollo:

“The book will kill the building.

When you compare architecture to the idea, which needs only a sheet of paper, some ink and a pen, is it surprising that the human intellect should have deserted architecture for the printing press?”

The great cathedrals – those “Bibles in stone” – did not vanish, but the avalanche of manuscripts and then printed text that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages did render cathedrals less important. As culture changed, architecture lost its emblematic role.

So it is with the book.

Above: Notre Dame de Paris

There is no need to suppose that the electronic book will replace the printed version.

Has film killed painting?

Television cinema?

However, there is no doubt that the book is the throes of a technological revolution that is changing our relationship to it profoundly.

A book represents a sort of unsurpassable perfection in the realm of the imagination.

What is a book?

What will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object?

Old-fashioned habits, perhaps.

A certain sense of the sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilization that has made it our Holy of Holies.

A peculiar intimacy between the author and the reader, which the concept of hypertextuality is bound to damage.

A sense of existing in a self-contained world that the book and, along with it, certain ways of reading used to represent.

What we call culture is in fact a lengthy process of selection and filtering.

Contemporary civilization, armed with every conceivable kind of technology, is still attempting to conserve culture safely, without much lasting success.

However determined we are to learn from the past, our libraries, museums and film archives will only ever contain the works that time has not destroyed.

Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.

The Internet has returned us to the alphabet.

If we thought we had become a purely visual civilization, the computer returns us to Gutenberg’s galaxy.

From now on, everyone has to read.

In order to read, you need a medium.

This medium cannot simply be a computer screen.

Spend two hours reading a novel on your computer and your eyes turn into tennis balls.

The book is like the spoon, the scissors, the hammer, the wheel.

Once invented, it cannot be improved.

There is no doubt that a lawyer could take his 25,000 case documents home more easily if they were loaded onto an e-book.

In many areas, the electronic book will turn out to be remarkably convenient, but I remain unconvinced – even with fast-rate reading technology – that it would be particularly advisable to read War and Peace on an e-book.

Hermann Hesse had some interesting things to say about the “re-legitimization” of the book that he thought would result from technical developments:

“The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority.

We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors have taken over functions from the book that it cannot afford to lose.“

Above: German writer / artist Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)

Cinema, radio and even television have taken nothing from the book – nothing that it couldn’t afford to lose.

At a certain point of time, man invented the written word.

Writing is an extension of the hand and therefore it is almost biological.

It is the communication tool most closely linked to the body.

Once invented, it could never be given up.

We have never needed to read and write as much as we do today.

If you cannot read and write, then you cannot use a computer.

Why do we read?

Generally, to profit from it, to grow somewhere in mind or spirit.

Good books, fiction or nonfiction, deserve reading.

Ask questions while you read – questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

There are four main questions you must ask about any book:

1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE?

Try to discover the leading theme of the book and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way.

2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL AND HOW?

Try to discover the main ideas, assertions and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.

3. IS THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR IN PART?

You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind.

4. WHAT OF IT?

If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance.

Why does the author think it is important to know these things?

Is it important to you to know them?

And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.

The four questions summarize the whole obligation of a reader.

Knowing what the four questions are is not enough. You must remember to ask them as you read.

Merely asking questions is not enough.

You have to try to answer them.

Grab a pen.

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it part of yourself.

The best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensible to reading it?

First, it keeps you awake.

Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking.

Thinking expresses itself in words.

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he is thinking.

Why do we write?

To know what we are thinking.

Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

Understanding is a two-way operation.

The learner has to question himself and question the teacher.

He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying.

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author.

It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Reading with pen in hand allows intimate communication with the writer.

We all begin as close readers.

Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read.

The more we read, the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning.

The more we read, the more we comprehend, the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a particular book.

Reading a book can make you want to write one.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem.

It can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.

More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make you want to write.

The better the book, the more you imagine.

Reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly.

Books are teachers, authorities to advise us, the models that inspire us with energy and courage to learn.

I will try to show you some writers that deserve a reading.

A movie may move us, but it demands little more than our attention.

A book demands we feel and think about what the book is trying to tell us, to use both our intelligence and our imagination.

God willing, I too will produce literature worthy of your time and attention, health and time permitting.

Put your phone down.

Turn the TV off.

Grab a book and a pen.

Begin the adventure of reading now.

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Wikiquote

• Google Photos

• How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

• Plot and Structure, James Scott Bell

• The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker

• Daily Rituals, Mason Currey

• This is NOT the end of the book, Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière

• Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose

• The Assassin’s Cloak, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor

Voices carry

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Tuesday 16 April 2024

Above: A spectrogram (0-5000 Hz) of the sentence “It’s all Greek to me.” spoken by a female voice

World Voice Day (WVD) is a worldwide annual event that takes place on 16 April devoted to the celebration of the phenomenon of voice. 

The aim is to demonstrate the enormous importance of the voice in the daily lives of all people.

Voice is a critical aspect of effective and healthy communication.

World Voice Day brings global awareness to the need for preventing voice problems, rehabilitating the deviant or sick voice, training the artistic voice, and researching the function and application of voice.

A goal of World Voice Day is to encourage all those who use their voice for business or pleasure to learn to take care of their voice, and know how to seek help and training, and to support research on the voice.

The World Voice Day was established with the main goals of increasing public awareness of the importance of the voice and alertness to voice problems.

My first experience with poetry was sugary-sweet and dripping in rhyme.

Dr. Seuss’s melodic stories captured my youthful attention, and I loved listening to how the words bounced off the page to form music of their own.

How do you read, enjoy, analyze, and remember the pieces you most love?

Do you read 10 poems in rapid succession?

One at a time?

Do you have to sit in a velvet housecoat, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and a crackling fire, to be considered ‘someone who reads poetry’?

How do you even start?

There is no proper way to start.

Poetry is a vast ocean.

In fact, it’s multiple vast oceans.

And each ocean has thousands of beaches leading into it.

Nobody will know everything about all the poetry.

So if you’re interested, start where you are.

Poetry is a personal experience—for both the writer and the reader.

The world is full of lyrical collections and melodical prose, and the poetry canon is growing more vibrant each passing day.

Where does one even begin?

Poetry anthologies are an excellent place to start because they offer a range of voices within time periods, places, or topics.

To continuously feed yourself new poetry, you can find local literary magazines, subscribe to Poetry Magazine, or sign up for daily poetry emails.

Once you find a favorite poet, follow the trail of their influences.

How To Read A Poem

1. Examine the title and the shape of the poem.
2. Read the poem as you normally read anything.
3. Re-read for meaning.
4. Re-read for sound (out loud, if you can).
5. Add context to paint a full picture.

Examine the way it takes up space on the page.

Read the title of the poem.

How does it make you feel?

How does the title fit the shape of the poem?

If the title is sad, let the shape of the poem inform the nuance of the emotion.

If it’s short and sparse, maybe it is coming from a place of desolation or desperation.

Long chaotic forms might mean it is coming from a place of confusion or anger.

Now, remove your expectations and begin reading.

Reading poetry doesn’t require a highfalutin’ approach.

You can read as you’d read anything else.

On the first pass through, absorb whatever it is that arises upon first impression. Notice where in the poem you react — maybe your stomach churns at a particular phrase, or you hold your breath at a certain line.

Explore the feelings that come up as you read.

Listen to yourself, and wonder what the poem is drawing out of you.

What is it that the poem knows about you that you don’t yet know about yourself?

Maybe it provides a bit of comfort for a part of your life that is comfortless.

Or maybe it provides challenge where you need it.

Above: The oldest love poem. Sumerian terracotta tablet from Nippur, Iraq. Ur III (Neo-Sumerian) period, 2037-2029 BCE. Ancient Orient Museum, Istanbul.

If the poem captivates you or rouses your emotions, you can uncover even more information on a second read through.

If you didn’t feel a connection to the piece, it is okay to skip over re-reading the poem.

You might come back years later to a particular poem, only to find that it connects to your heart in ways it didn’t before.

The second read-through is where you look up definitions and pronunciations of words you don’t know and examine any footnotes.

If there’s historical context or the poem is referencing a specific event you are not familiar with, look that up, too.

Having this knowledge adds weight to the poem and makes each reading feel like a reverence.

Look for little clues you may have missed — word choices that bolster the metaphor, repetitions that indicate a deeper theme, or unusual line breaks that alter the meaning of a phrase.

Consider the speaker of the poem.

Is it the poet themselves?

Is it an omniscient being or a single narrow perspective?

Who is the audience of this poem?

This will further illuminate its meaning (and the intention).

Look for where the poem offers a moment of surprise.

Sometimes a poem has a ‘turn’, a place where it pivots on itself.

This might be expected or it might be shocking.

Above: The Old English epic poem Beowulf, British Museum, London

Try reading the poem out loud or search for readings of the poem online.

This is where the music of a poem emerges, and you can feel the shape of each word and line as you move through it.

Poetry has music in it.

You can hear the music:

In the sounds of the words, perhaps the vowel sounds, or the rhythm, or rhyme, or the spaces in between words.

Listen to the internal music of the poem.

Sound is no accident in poetry, so consider how word choice, rhythm, and cadence make the poem feel.

Above: Statue of runic singer Petri Shemeikka at Kolmikulmanpuisto Park in Sortavala, Karelia

Return to the beginning.

How does the title play with the rest of the poem?

Does the shape of the poem have anything to do with its meaning?

Dig into the author’s history.

Look at the publication date and consider the world around the poem when it was first released.

Consider where the poem lives:

Was it released as part of the author’s poetry book or was it published in a literary magazine?

If you’re reading it as part of a collection, why do you think this particular poem was selected?

Who selected it?

What is the hunger of the poem?

Why did this poem need to be written?

What is its intelligence?

What is it yearning for?

Treating the poem with this kind of curiosity, you will find it draws on parts of your own story.

There’s always more to learn from a poem you love; just when you think you’ve gleaned everything from its meaning, it can strike you with a new insight.

Bookmark or note the poems that inspire you, and revisit them when you’re feeling lonely, homesick, or untethered.

Which poems are those, you ask?

You’ll know which ones speak directly to your heart when you read them.

Above: Divine Comedy: Dante and Beatrice see God as a point of light.

Why did my parents send me to the schools

That I with knowledge might enrich my mind?

Since the desire to know first made men fools,

And did corrupt the root of all mankind.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: John Davies

The desire to know causes me to seek out what is special about this day.

I learn that today was the birthday of English poet John Davies (16 April 1569 – 1626), whose poem opens this post.

Above: John Davies

For when God’s hand had written in the hearts

Of the first parents all the rules of good,

So that their skill infused did pass all arts

That ever were, before or since the Flood,

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: The Creation of Adam (1511), Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

Learning of English statesman / poet Charles Montagu (16 April 1661 – 1715), a Wikipedia link leads to a poetry portal wherein I learn that the making of a poem involves rhythm and sound.

Above: Charles Montagu

Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word poiesis, “making“), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning.

A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

Poetry is a kind of spontaneous overflowing of the personality, expressed in written words but needing the physical act of sound to reproduce feeling.

The poet reaches down deep into himself to produce his poems.

A poem’s point of origin is a mysterious well of creation within the mind, spurred by the soul.

Though anyone could theoretically make poetry at any time in a kind of solitary sensitivity session, the trick mastered by only a few is to seize the poetic impulse and arrange words in an orderly and disciplined way.

Words are weapons that are blunt unless the poem praises or rouses to action through rhyme and rhythm.

A good poem can be worked at, read and re-read, and thought about over and over for the rest of your life.

You will never stop finding new things in it, new pleasures and delights and also new ideas about yourself and the world.

Above: The philosopher Confucius was influential in the developed approach to poetry and ancient music theory.

Read a poem without stopping.

Remember that any good poem has a unity.

We cannot discover that unity, the experience of the poem, until it is read in its entirety.

Read the poem out loud.

The very voice of speaking the words allow you to understand a poem’s power perfectly.

And when their reason’s eye was sharp and clear,

And, as an eagle can behold the sun,

Could have approached th’eternal light as near

As the intellectual angels could have done,

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of Canadian poet Octave Crémazie (16 April 1827 – 1879), the “father of French Canadian poetry“.

After finishing his studies at the Seminary of Québec, Crémazie went into business with his brother Joseph, a bookseller.

Their shop in Québec City, the J. et O. Crémazie bookstore, established in 1833, was instrumental in the North American dissemination of works by many Romantic writers.

It was also a meeting place for the members of what would become known as Quebec’s literary movement of 1860.

How many writers have dreamed of having their own bookshop?

How many writers have dreamed of being inside their own literary society?

While still in his early 20s, Crémazie helped found the Institut canadien, an organization devoted to the promotion of French Canadian culture. 

He would later serve as the organization’s president.

Above: Flag of the Canadian province of Québec

Crémazie’s first published poems appeared in L’Ami de la religion et de la patrie (edited by his brother Jacques) and other Québec City newspapers. 

Recognition for his poetry grew throughout the 1850s.

As French Canadian literature scholar Odette Condemine writes:

His nostalgic evocation of the happiness that preceded the Conquest and the miseries that followed roused his compatriots’ fervour.

“Le vieux soldat canadien” (1855) and “Le Drapeau de Carillon” (1858) were enthusiastically received and won Crémazie his title as “national bard”.

“Then he compared, seeing this shore,
Where glory often crowned his courage,
The happiness of yesteryear to the misfortunes of today:
And all the memories that filled his life.
Pressed in turn into his tender soul,
Numerous as the waves which flowed before him.”

(“Le vieux soldat canadien“, Octave Crémazie)

The longing for a glorious, vanished past and the sense of estrangement from France in Crémazie’s work has prompted the critic Gilles Marcotte to describe it as “a poetry of exile“.

“As in the sweet memory of holy Zion,
Israel in exile had broken its lyre,
And, from the foreign master suffering oppression,
Threw to heaven the cry of impotent delirium,
All our proud peasants with their joyful voices
No longer awakened the the echo that slept on our banks;
Regretting and mourning the beautiful days of yesteryear,
Their songs found only plaintive notes.“

(“Le drapeau de Carillon“, Octave Crémazie)

Above: Flag of Nouveau France

There are moments when I feel like I am in exile as a Canadian working as a teacher in Türkiye while his German wife works in Switzerland.

Above: Flag of Canada

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion

There the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight here tonight
Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our hearts
Be acceptable in Thy sight here tonight

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion“

(“By the rivers of Babylon“, Boney M)

Despite the popularity of his bookstore, Octave Crémazie’s extravagant taste for foreign commodities led to large debts and trouble with creditors.

Above: Images of Québec City

I view the stock market as I view all institutions of gambling.

If you can’t afford to lose, you can’t afford to play.

By 1862, his financial situation had become so dire that he fled to France in secret, leaving the bookstore bankrupt. 

He lived at different times in Paris, Bordeaux and Le Havre under the name of Jules Fontaine, poor and isolated despite having secured a modest job and the support of a few French friends.

Crémazie’s poetic production stopped when he left Québec. 

The documents that survive from his later years include his Journal du siège de Paris, a diary detailing the hardship that Parisians and Crémazie himself endured during the siege of the capital in 1870 and 1871.

Above: St. Cloud, Paris, 1871

Many of his letters to close friends and family members also survive, including his correspondence with the priest Raymond Casgrain, to whom Crémazie often expressed his ideas about literature.

Above: Abbot Raymond Casgrain (1831 – 1904)

Octave Crémazie died in Le Havre on 16 January 1879.

Above: Panorama of Le Havre

A statue depicting a French Canadian soldier stands in Montréal’s Saint Louis Square (Rue de Malines and Saint-Denis) with Crémazie’s name across the top and the years 1827–1879 (his years of birth and death).

Underneath the soldier are the words: 

Pour mon drapeau je viens ici mourir 

(“For my flag I come here to die“).

Above: Monument to Crémazie located at St-Louis Square in Montréal

But would Nouveau France die for its people?

Above: Coat of arms of Nouveau France

There is also a Montreal Métro station named for him on the Orange Line, located on the boulevard likewise named in his honour.

 

Even then to them the spirit of lies suggests

That they were blind, because they saw not ill,

And breathes into their incorrupted breasts

A curious wish, which did corrupt their will.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of French writer Anatole France (16 April 1844 – 1924).

A French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. 

He was a member of the Académie Française.

He won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament“.

Above: Anatole France

France began his literary career as a poet and a journalist.

In 1869, Le Parnasse contemporain published one of his poems, “La Part de Madeleine“.

In 1875, he sat on the committee in charge of the third Parnasse contemporain compilation.

As a journalist, from 1867, he wrote many articles and notices.

He became known with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). 

Its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodied France’s own personality.

The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the Académie Française.

In La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893) France ridiculed belief in the occult.

(Story idea:

Montréal, modern day, a plongeur (dishwasher) at a St. Hubert chicken restaurant is drawn to a woman who is an ardent believer in astrology.)

In Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard (1893), France captured the atmosphere of the fin de siècle.

He was elected to the Académie Française in 1896.

France took a part in the Dreyfus Affair.

Above: French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859 – 1935)

He signed Emile Zola’s manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage. 

Above: French writer Emile Zola (1840 – 1902)

France wrote about the Affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret.

France’s later works include L’Île des Pingouins (1908) which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans – after the birds have been baptized by mistake by the almost-blind Abbot Mael.

It is a satirical history of France, starting in Medieval times, going on to the author’s own time with special attention to the Dreyfus affair and concluding with a dystopian future. 

(Story idea:

Kafka’s Metamorphosis meets The Planet of the Apes – people’s personalities emerge as the animals their behaviour most emulates.)

Les dieux ont soif (1912) is a novel, set in Paris during the French Revolution, about a true-believing follower of Maximilien Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793 – 1794.

It is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism and explores various other philosophical approaches to the events of the time. 

La Revolte des Anges (1914) is often considered France’s most profound and ironic novel.

Loosely based on the Christian understanding of the War in Heaven, it tells the story of Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice d’Esparvieu.

Bored because Bishop d’Esparvieu is sinless, Arcade begins reading the Bishop’s books on theology and becomes an atheist.

He moves to Paris, meets a woman, falls in love and loses his virginity causing his wings to fall off, joins the revolutionary movement of fallen angels, and meets the Devil, who realizes that if he overthrew God, he would become just like God.

Arcade realizes that replacing God with another is meaningless unless “in ourselves and in ourselves alone we attack and destroy laldabaoth“.

“Laldabaoth“, according to France, is God’s secret name and means “the child who wanders“.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921.

On 31 May 1922, France’s entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books“) of the Catholic Church.

He regarded this as a “distinction“.

Above: Coat of arms of the Holy See

France had socialist sympathies and was an outspoken supporter of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

However he also vocally defended the institution of monarchy as more inclined to peace than bourgeois democracy, saying in relation to efforts to end the First World War that:

“A king of France, yes a king, would have had pity on our poor, exhausted, bloodlet nation.

However democracy is without a heart and without entrails.

When serving the powers of money, it is pitiless and inhuman.” 

In 1920, he gave his support to the newly founded French Communist Party. 

In his book Lys Rouge, France famously wrote:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”

I don’t entirely subscribe to Anatole’s POV.

The evil isn’t democracy but rather excessive capitalism.

The solution isn’t Communism but rather it is social democracy.

He died on 13 October 1924.

He is buried in the Neuilly sur Seine Old Communal Cemetery near Paris.

Above: Neuilly-sur-Seine Cemetery, Hauts-de-Seine, France

For that same ill they straight desired to know;

Which ill, being nought but a defect of good,

And all God’s works the devil could not show

While man their lord in his perfection stood.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens (1615) depicting both domestic and exotic wild animals such as tigers, parrots, and ostriches co-existing in the Garden

I think of Irish writer John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 1909).

Synge was born in Newtown Villas Raathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.

Synge’s father died from smallpox in 1872 at the age of 49.

He was buried on his son’s first birthday.

Above: John Millington Synge

His mother moved the family to the house next door to her own mother’s house in Rathgar, County Dublin.

Although often ill, Synge had a happy childhood there.

He developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore.

Above: Greystones harbour, Ireland

 

In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem, Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

Above: John Millington Synge

After graduating from Dublin’s Trinity College, Synge moved to Germany to study music.

He stayed in Koblenz during 1893 and moved to Würzburg in January 1894. 

Owing partly to his shyness about performing in public, and partly to his doubt about his ability, he decided to abandon music and pursue his literary interests.

Above: Flag of modern Germany

He returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne.

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Paris

He met Cherrie Matheson during summer breaks with his family in Dublin.

He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion.

This rejection affected Synge greatly and reinforced his determination to spend as much time as possible outside Ireland.

Above: Flag of Ireland

In 1896, he visited Italy to study the language before returning to Paris.

He planned on making a career in writing about French authors for the English press. 

Above: Flag of France

In that same year he met W. B. Yeats, who encouraged him to live for a while in the Aran Islands and then return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work.

Above: Irısh writer William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

Above: The Aran Islands

In 1899 he joined with Yeats, Isabella Augusta (Lady Gregory) and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre. 

Above: Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932)

Above: Irısh writer George William Russell (1867 – 1935)

He wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne’s Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siècle style.

In 1897, Synge suffered his first attack of Hodgkin’s, after which an enlarged gland was removed from his neck. 

He visited Lady Gregory’s home, at Coole Park near Gort, County Galway, where he met Yeats again and Edward Martyn.

Above: Irısh playwright Edward Martyn (1859 – 1923)

He spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year. 

He also visited Brittany regularly. 

Above: Flag of Brittany

During this period he wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set which he sent to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it.

The play was not published until it appeared in his Collected Works.

Synge’s first account of life on the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 and his book, The Aran Islands, completed in 1901 and published in 1907.

Synge considered the book “my first serious piece of work“. 

Lady Gregory read the manuscript and advised Synge to remove any direct naming of places and to add more folk stories, but he declined to do either because he wanted to create something more realistic.

The book conveys Synge’s belief that beneath the Catholicism of the islanders, it was possible to detect a substratum of the pagan beliefs of their ancestors.

His experiences in the Arans formed the basis for the plays about Irish rural life that Synge went on to write.

Synge left Paris for London in 1903.

He had written two one-act plays, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, the previous year.

These met with Lady Gregory’s approval.

The Shadow of the Glen was performed at the Molesworth Hall in October 1903.

Riders to the Sea was staged at the same venue in February the following year. 

The Shadow of the Glen formed part of the bill for the opening run of the Abbey Theatre from 27 December 1904 to 3 January 1905. 

Both plays were based on stories that Synge had collected in the Arans.

He also relied on Hiberno-English, the English dialect of Ireland, to reinforce its usefulness as a literary language, partly because he believed that the Irish language could not survive.

The Shadow of the Glen is based on a story about an unfaithful wife, and was criticised by the Irish nationalist leader Arthur Griffith as “a slur on Irish womanhood“.

Years later Synge wrote:

“When I was writing ‘The Shadow of the Glen’ some years ago I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.” 

Griffith’s criticism encouraged more attacks alleging that Synge described Irish women in an unfair manner. 

Riders to the Sea was also attacked by nationalists, this time including Patrick Pearse, who decried it because of the author’s attitude to God and religion.

Pearse, Griffith and other conservative-minded Catholics claimed Synge had done a disservice to Irish nationalism by not idealising his characters, but later critics have stated he idealised the Irish peasantry too much. 

A third one-act play, The Tinker’s Wedding, was drafted around this time, but Synge initially made no attempt to have it performed, largely because of a scene in which a priest is tied up in a sack, which, as he wrote to the publisher Elkin Mathews in 1905, would probably upset “a good many of our Dublin friends“.

Synge’s next play, The Well of the Saints, was staged at the Abbey in 1905, again to nationalist disapproval, and then in 1906 at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin. 

The setting is specified as “some lonely mountainous district in the east of Ireland one or more centuries ago“.

Martin and Mary Doul are two blind beggars who have been led by the lies of the townsfolk to believe that they are beautiful when in fact they are old and ugly.

A saint cures them of their blindness with water from a holy well and at first sight they are disgusted by each other.

Martin goes to work for Timmy the smith and tries to seduce Timmy’s betrothed, Molly, but she viciously rejects him and Timmy sends him away.

Martin and Mary both lose their sight again.

When the saint returns to wed Timmy and Molly, Martin refuses his offer to cure their blindness again.

The saint takes offence and the townsfolk banish the couple, who head south in search of kinder neighbours.

The critic Joseph Holloway asserted that the play combined “lyric and dirt“.

Synge’s widely regarded masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed on 26 January 1907, at the Abbey Theatre.

A comedy about apparent patricide (the act of killing your father), it attracted a hostile reaction from sections of the Irish public.

The Freeman’s Journal described it as “an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood“. 

Arthur Griffith, who believed that the Abbey Theatre was insufficiently politically committed, described the play as “a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform“, and perceived a slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line “… a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts …” 

At the time, a shift (undergarment worn next to the skin beneath a dress) was known as a symbol representing Kitty O’Shea and her adulterous relationship with Charles Stuart Parnell.

It tells the story of Christy Mahon, a young man running away from his farm, claiming he killed his father.

On the west coast of County Mayo Christy Mahon stumbles into Flaherty’s tavern.

There he claims that he is on the run because he killed his own father by driving a loy (spade) into his head.

Flaherty praises Christy for his boldness.

Flaherty’s daughter (the barmaid), Pegeen, falls in love with Christy, to the dismay of her betrothed, Shawn Keogh.

Because of the novelty of Christy’s exploits and the skill with which he tells his own story, he becomes something of a town hero.

Many other women also become attracted to him, including the Widow Quin, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Christy at Shawn’s behest.

Christy also impresses the village women by his victory in a donkey race, using the slowest beast.

Eventually Christy’s father, Mahon, who was only wounded, tracks him to the tavern.

When the townsfolk realize that Christy’s father is alive, everyone, including Pegeen, shuns him as a liar and a coward.

To regain Pegeen’s love and the respect of the town, Christy attacks his father a second time.

This time it seems that Old Mahon really is dead, but instead of praising Christy, the townspeople, led by Pegeen, bind and prepare to hang him to avoid being implicated as accessories to his crime.

Christy’s life is saved when his father, beaten and bloodied, crawls back onto the scene, having improbably survived his son’s second attack.

As Christy and his father leave to wander the world, having reconciled, Shawn suggests that he and Pegeen get married soon, but she spurns him.

Pegeen laments betraying and losing Christy:

“I’ve lost the only playboy of the western world.”

A section of the audience at the opening rioted, causing the third act to be acted out in dumbshow (mime).

The disturbances continued for a week, interrupting the following performances.

(Story idea:

A possible modification to my novel, The Donkey Trail, wherein the protagonist is accused of being a “playboy” for desiring to be separated from his wife.)

Although the writing of The Tinker’s Wedding began at the same time as Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, it took Synge five years to complete and was not finished in 1907. 

Riders was performed in the Racquet Court theatre in Galway on 4 – 8 January 1907, but not performed again until 1909, and only then in London.

The first critic to respond to the play was Daniel Corkery, who said:

“One is sorry Synge ever wrote so poor a thing, and one fails to understand why it ever should have been staged anywhere.”

Above: John Millington Synge

Synge died from Hodgkin lymphoma at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin on 24 March 1909, aged 37. 

He was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross, Dublin. 

Above: The entrance to Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin

John Masefield, who knew Synge, wrote that he “gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality“. 

Masefield said that Synge’s view of life originated in his poor health.

In particular, Masefield said:

“His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does.”

Above: English poet John Masefield (1878 – 1967)

Yeats described Synge as timid and shy, who “never spoke an unkind word” yet his art could “fill the streets with rioters“. 

Richard Ellmann, the biographer of Yeats and James Joyce, stated that Synge “built a fantastic drama out of Irish life“.

Above: American literary critic / biographer Richard Ellmann (1918 – 1987)

Yeats described Synge in the poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory“:

“…And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

That dying chose the living world for text

And never could have rested in the tomb

But that, long travelling, he had come

Towards nightfall upon certain set apartIn a most desolate stony place,

Towards nightfall upon a race

Passionate and simple like his heart.“

Above: W. B. Yeats

Synge was a political radical, immersed in the socialist literature of William Morris, and in his own words “wanted to change things root and branch“.

Above: English writer William Morris (1834 – 1896)

So that themselves were first to do the ill,

Ere they thereof the knowledge could attain;

Like him that knew not poison’s power to kill,

Until, by tasting it, himself was slain.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of English comic actor, filmmaker and composer Charlie Chaplin (16 April 1899 – 1977) who rose to fame in the era of silent film.

He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry’s most important figures.

His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.

Above: Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin’s childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship.

His father was absent and his mother struggled financially — he was sent to a workhouse twice before age 9.

When he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum.

Chaplin began performing at an early age, touring music halls and later working as a stage actor and comedian.

At 19, he was signed to the Fred Karno company, which took him to the United States.

Above: English comedian Frederick John Westcott (aka Fred Karno) (1865 – 1941)

He was scouted for the film industry and began appearing in 1914 for Keystone Studios.

He soon developed the Tramp persona and attracted a large fanbase.

He directed his own films and continued to hone his craft.

By 1918, he was one of the world’s best-known figures.

Above: Chaplin as the Tramp

In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists, which gave him complete control over his films.

His first feature-length film was The Kid (1921), followed by A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).

He initially refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue.

His first sound film was The Great Dictator (1940), which satirised Adolf Hitler.

The 1940s were marked with controversy for Chaplin, and his popularity declined rapidly.

He was accused of Communist sympathies.

Some members of the press and public were scandalised by his involvement in a paternity suit and marriages to much younger women.

An FBI investigation was opened.

Chaplin was forced to leave the US and settle in Switzerland.

He abandoned the Tramp in his later films, which include Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), A King in New York (1957) and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967).

Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in and composed the music for most of his films.

He was a perfectionist and his financial independence enabled him to spend years on the development and production of a picture.

His films are characterised by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp’s struggles against adversity.

Many contain social and political themes, as well as autobiographical elements.

He received an Honorary Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century” in 1972, as part of a renewed appreciation for his work.

He continues to be held in high regard, with The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator often ranked on lists of the greatest films.

I have watched and rewatched Chaplin’s Tramp films and thoroughly admired his closing speech in The Great Dictator.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor.

That’s not my business.

I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. 

I should like to help everyone, if possible — Jew, gentile, black man, white.

We all want to help one another. 

Human beings are like that.

We want to live by each other’s happiness — not by each other’s misery.

We don’t want to hate and despise one another.

In this world, there is room for everyone.

And the good Earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. 

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.

Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. 

Our knowledge has made us cynical.

Our cleverness, hard and unkind.

We think too much and feel too little. 

More than machinery, we need humanity.

More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.

Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. 

The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. 

Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world — millions of despairing men, women and little children — victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. 

To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers!

Don’t give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! 

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!

You are not machines!

You are not cattle!

You are men!

You have the love of humanity in your hearts.

You don’t hate!

Only the unloved hate — the unloved and the unnatural!

Soldiers!

Don’t fight for slavery!

Fight for liberty!

In the 17th chapter of St. Luke, it is written:

“The Kingdom of God is within man” — not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men!

In you! 

You, the people, have the power — the power to create machines.

The power to create happiness! 

You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power!

Let us all unite!

Let us fight for a new world — a decent world, that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future, and old age a security.

By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power.

But they lie!

They do not fulfill their promise — they never will.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!

Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise! 

Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.

Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers!

In the name of democracy, let us all unite!“

(The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin)

I have visited the Charlie Chaplin Museum and gravesite in Vevey, Switzerland.

I love Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of the great actor in Chaplin.

Even so by tasting of that fruit forbid,

Where they sought knowledge, they did error find;

Ill they desired to know, and ill they did,

And to give passion eyes, made reason blind.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of the American writer of children’s stories Gertrude Chandler Warner (16 April 1890 – 1979).

She was most famous for writing the original book of The Boxcar Children and for the next 18 books in the series.

Above: Gertrude Chandler Warner

When she was 5, Warner dreamed of being an author.

Later, she accomplished that dream and started writing The Boxcar Children.

She began writing in ten-cent blank books as soon as she was able to hold a pencil.

While growing up, Warner loved to read.

Her favorite book was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

However, because of her frequent illnesses, Warner never finished high school.

After leaving, she studied with a tutor and finished her secondary education.

In 1918, while she was teaching Sunday School, Warner was called to teach first grade, mainly because male teachers were being called to serve in WW1.

Warner continued teaching as a grade school teacher in Putnam from 1918 to 1950.

Warner was a lover of nature.

While growing up, she had butterfly and moth collections, pressed wildflowers, learned of all the birds in her backyard and other places, and kept a garden to see what butterflies were doing.

She used these interests in teaching her grade school students, and also used nature themes in her books.

For instance, in The Boxcar Children: Surprise Island, the Alden children make a nature museum from the flowers, shells and seaweed they have collected and the shapes of birds they have observed.

One of her students recalled the wildflower and stone-gathering contests that Warner sponsored when she was a teacher.

As well as her books in the The Boxcar Children series, Warner wrote many other books for children, including The World in a Barn (1927), Windows into Alaska (1928), The World on a Farm (1931) and Peter Piper, Missionary Parakeet (1967).

With her sister, Frances Lester Warner, she cowrote “Life’s Minor Collisions“, a series of essays about humorous conflicts of temperament among friends and families.

Warner never married.

She lived in her parents’ home for almost 40 years, then moved to her grandmother’s house.

In 1962, she moved to a brown-shingled house and lived there with her companion, a retired nurse.

In her later life, before she died at age 89, Warner became a volunteer for the American Red Cross, a Cancer Society and other charitable organizations to help kids and adults in need from suffering.

She is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, in Putnam.

Warner once said that she did much of her writing while convalescing from illnesses or accidents, and that she conceived the idea of The Boxcar Children while sick at home.

Of this, she said:

“I had to stay at home from school because of an attack of bronchitis.

Having written a series of eight books to order for a religious organization, I decided to write a book just to suit myself.

What would I like to do?

Well, I would like to live in a freight car, or a caboose.

I would hang my wash out on the little back piazza and cook my stew on the little rusty stove found in the caboose.“

Warner once acknowledged that The Boxcar Children was criticized for depicting children with little parental supervision.

Her critics thought that this would encourage child rebellion.

Her response was, however, that the children liked it for that very reason. 

In her books, Warner “liked to stress the Aldens’ independence and resourcefulness and their solid New England devotion to using up and making do“.

On 3 July 2004, the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Children Museum opened in Putnam, Connecticut.

It is located across the street from Warner’s childhood home and is housed in an authentic 1920s New Haven R.R. boxcar.

The museum is dedicated to Warner’s life and work, and includes original signed books, photos and artifacts from her life and career as a teacher in Putman.

Included is the desk at which a 9-year-old Warner wrote her first story titled Golliwog at the Zoo.

There is also a re-creation of the living space created by the Aldens – the Boxcar Children themselves.

For then their minds did first in passion see

Those wretched shapes of misery and woe,

Of nakedness, of shame, of poverty,

Which then their own experience made them know.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: Adam and Eve (1628), Peter Paul Rubens

I think of Québec novelist Germaine Guèvremont (16 April 1893 – 1968), best known for her novel Le Survenant (The Outlander).

Above: Germaine Guèvremont

Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel is a village located near Sorel.

A strnager asks for a meal and a place to spend the night.

In the days that follow, without ever revealing his name or his origins, he helps carry out farm work and proves to be a good worker.

Old Didace, the father of the family, offers him a home in exchange for his work.

His son Amable-Didace and his daughter-in-law Alphonsine take a dim view of the intrusion of this “outlander” into the family, especially since he eclipses them with his strength and his hard work.

Winter is coming.

Having travelled widely and being an outstanding storyteller, the “grand god of the road” has such a strong attraction on the inhabitants of the hamlet that everyone rushes to the Beauchemin house to hear him.

They are sedentary people, anchored in their traditions, who know very little about the vast world.

Angélina, a neighbor who has rejected all the suitors in the neighborhood, falls in love with him and the Outlander seems to respond to her love.

Winter passes and the Outlander seems to want to stay in the village.

The friendship of the father, who would like to have a son like him, and the frank love of the neighbor make him forget the pettiness to which he is subjected in this closed and resolutely traditional environment.

We admire his strength and his skill at work, but we criticize his fighting temperament and his penchant for alcohol.

Summer is coming again.

The hero finds himself at a crossroads:

To stay or to go?

If he stays, it’s the house, the security, the economy in everything and everywhere, the small land of 27 acres, nine perches, and the constant worry of big money.

If he, on the other hand, goes, it is freedom, the race in the mountains with its mystery of decline.

And suddenly:

A cowbell in the wind.

The bark of a dog.

A twist of smoke.

About ten houses.

Strange faces.

From the new country.

The road.

The wide world.

Realizing that he will never really be part of the “mean little world” that is the village, he gives in to the call of the road that has tormented him since the spring.

At the beginning of autumn, a year after his arrival, he leaves as he came, without even a goodbye for Angélina or Father Didace who had become his allies.

The Outlander changed the lives of the main characters of the story:

Father Didace, a widower, falls in love with Acayenne, also a widow, and despite his advanced age, decides at the end of the story to marry and to start a new family.

His son Amable and her daughter-in-law Alphonsine, who have been trying to start a family for a long time, expect their first child.

Angélina, by falling in love with the Outlander, frees herself from her shell.

But then grew reason dark, that she no more

Could the fair forms of good and truth discern;

Bats they became, that eagles were before,

And this they got by their desire to learn.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of Turkish writer Mehmet Behçet Gönül (aka Behçet Necatigil) (16 April 1916 – 1979).

He is one of the leading poets of modern Turkish poetry.  

He did not join any literary movement.

He was an independent poet and intellectual.  

Apart from poetry, he produced works in many fields of literature, from theater to mythology, from lexicography to novel translations and radio plays.

He contributed greatly to the adoption of radiophonic play as a branch of literature in Turkey with his plays, translations and adaptations.  

The artist, who is known as the “Poet of Houses“, is also known for his identity as a teacher as well as his literary work.

Above: Mehmet Behçet Gönül (aka Behçet Necatigil)

People have built houses for centuries. 

They built wooden houses and masonry houses,

Large and small,

Different from each other. 

People were born and died,

People came and went, 

The inside of the houses changed from time to time. 

The outside of the houses were windows and walls. 

Black-hearted people lived in the houses glorified by the looters who were shot. 

Those poor people lived in houses destroyed by daily fears. 

Most of the houses became old and could not be repaired. 

Most of the houses could not be depicted properly. 

Some seemed satisfied with life. 

Some kept up with the times. 

Inside the houses there is sadness room by room, 

Outside the houses there are windows and walls. 

Happiness bubbled like soap in the houses: 

It came from outside, like a pomegranate, 

It increased and did not decrease. 

Disasters swept through the houses like storms: 

Like storms older than fate, 

They never ceased. 

Peace and order in most of the houses have become a memory of the past. 

Don’t seek to please,

To respect,

To remember. 

Children are rebels against the family, 

An avalanche breaks out because of sadness. 

Many murders were committed in houses, 

People didn’t even feel it. 

Family secrets within four walls, 

So many children,

So many men,

So many women 

Fed with tears. 

In whose houses are the little ones instead of the big man? 

Crowded families whose children rushed to work. 

Fateless offspring of school ages, 

Sweat flowing from tiny palms in the evenings, 

It replaced salt in the food of homes. 

The fate of people obviously depends on the houses: 

Rich houses looked down on the poor from a very high level, 

Houses at their level gave and took girls. 

Some of them missed the higher life, 

They struggled to climb higher 

They did not leave the houses 

The smoke of the stoves was just rising 

“Woman’s greatest power is in man’s work” 

The men ran away,

The women escaped

(“Evler“, Behçet Necatigil)

He was born in a mansion in Atikalipaşa in the Fatih district of Istanbul.

The mansion where Necatigil was born burned down in the Great Fatih Fire in 1918.

His mother’s illness, who was suffering from severe stomach fever, was aggravated by the effect of this trauma. 

Mehmet Behçet, who was only two years old, lost his mother that year.

Above: Hagia Sophia, Fatih, İstanbul

For a while, he lived in his grandmother Emine Münire Hanım’s house in Karagümrük district.

His father, Mehmet Necati Efendi, who married Saime Hanım, the daughter of a palace officer, and had two daughters in this marriage, lived in Beşiktaş district.

Due to his grandmother’s illness, Necatigil moved to his father in 1923 and received primary education at Cevriusta School in Beşiktaş.

The family moved to Kastamonu after his father got a job as an inspector at the Singer Sewing Machines company. 

Necatigil completed his primary education at Kastamonu Male Teacher Training School.

He started his secondary education at Kastamonu’s Abdurrahmanpaşa Lisesi.

He began to be interested in literature in Kastamonu in 1927.

He published the magazine Küçük Muharrir in his own handwriting, so his first readers were his friends and relatives.

The person who motivated him was his Turkish teacher, the poet Zeki Ömer Defne.

He used the name Küçük Muharrir (Little Writer) in the newspaper Akşam in which his poems, short stories and anecdotes were published between 1931 and 1932.

However, he had to interrupt his education due to “adenitis tuberculosis” due to malnutrition and neglect.

Above: Kastamonu

The family moved to Istanbul.

After his treatment, Necatigil started again in the second grade of secondary school at Kabataş Lisesi.

His first poem Gece ve Yas (Night and Mourning) was published in the magazine Varlık when he was a high school student.

In the following years, his poems and translations were published in the famous magazines Varlık, Türk Dili, Yeditepe, Oluş, Gençlik, Yeni Dergi, Yeni Edebiyat, Yelken, Ataç, Yenilikler and Yeni İnsan.

His articles were published in the newspaper Cumhuriyet.

Above: Kabataş Lisesi, Beşiktaş, İstanbul

After graduating from high school, he received higher education at the Turkish Language and Literature Department of the Higher Teacher Training School. 

He completed his higher education in 1940 and started teaching.

His first place of duty as a literature teacher was Kars Alpaslan Lisesi.

Above: Images of Kars

After having difficulty adapting to the climatic conditions and falling ill, he was appointed to Zonguldak Mehmet Çelikel Lisesi in 1941.

Here he collaborated with Turkish poets Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu and Rüştü Onur.

His poems were published together with these poets in Öcak, one of the newspapers of Zonguldak, in Kara Elmas and Değirmen magazines, published in Istanbul. 

Above: Zonguldak

When adenitis tuberculosis appeared again because of the polluted and damp weather in Zonguldak, he was appointed to İstanbul Pertevniyal Lisesi as a literature teacher in March 1943 at his request.

The poet left Istanbul two months later due to his military service.

He did his military service in Ankara and İstanbul as a reserve officer between 1943 and 1945.

He was appointed to Kabataş Lisesi when he returned.

He spent the longest period of his teaching career at this school.  

He became the teacher of writers and poets, such as Demir Özlü and Hilmi Yavuz, at Kabataş. 

He was instrumental in the publication of the magazine Donum at this school. 

His first poetry book, Kapalı Çarşı (“Grand Bazaar“), was published in 1945.

He carried out teaching and poetry simultaneously throughout his life.

The poet published Çevre (“Environment“) (1951), Evler (“Houses“) (1953) and Eski Toprak (“Ancient Land“) (1956) between 1945 and 1955.

The poems in these books were poems that directly expressed his observations and experiences and associations. 

He changed his poetics in 1955. 

He wrote books with little story element and full of evocative poems. 

He started writing radio plays in 1963.

He became one of the hardest workers in Turkey and collected his works in this field in four volumes. 

He also translated the books of many German and Norwegian writers and poets, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Miguel De Unamuno, Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig into Turkish.

In addition to his poems, radio plays and translations, he wrote Edebiyatımızda İsimler Sözlüğü (“Dictionary of Names in Our Literature“) (1960), Edebiyatımızda Eserler Sözlüğü (“Dictionary of Works in Our Literature“) (1979) and 100 Soruda Mitologya (“Mythology in 100 Questions”) (1969).

Necatigil, who was appointed to Çapa Education Institute in 1960, retired from this school in 1972.

He spent his retirement days at home, concentrating on literature and working.

Above: Behçet Necatigil’s typewriter and the Turkish Language Association Poetry Award

In 1979, he died at Cerrahpaşa Hospital where he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

He is buried in Zincirlikuyu Graveyard.

Above: Behçet Necatigil Statue, Beşiktaş, İstanbul

The name of Camgöz Sokak (street), where the poet lived between 1955 and 1964 and was the subject of one of his poems, was changed to “Behçet Necatigil Sokak” in 1987. 

A tram stop in Eskişehir Tepebaşı region bears the poet’s name.

Above: Behçet Necatigil tram stop, Tepebaşı, Eskişehir

Necatigil’s intern teaching days in Zonguldak were portrayed in the 2013 movie Kelebeğin Rüyası, about the poets Rüştü Onur and Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu.

Kelebeğin Rüyası (Butterfly’s Dream) is a 2013 drama film written and directed by Yılmaz Erdoğan.

The film tells the life story of young poets Rüştü Onur and Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu who live in Zonguldak during WW2.

Yılmaz Erdoğan plays Behçet Necatigil, who was a literature teacher at the poets’ Mehmet Çelikel High School at that time.

The movie begins in Zonguldak in 1941.

While two young poets, Rüştü Onur and Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu continue their civil servant lives in this newly modernizing mining city, they also live intertwined with art, literature and, most of all, poetry.

While the young Republic, which had just gotten back on its feet, was trying to modernize, WW2 was also taking place in Europe.

These two consumptive young poets, who live in a society where the appreciation of poetry and art has not yet matured, are trying to make every segment of society love poetry.

Rüştü and Muzaffer’s belief in poetry increases even more when the Mayor’s daughter, Suzan Özsöy, comes back to Zonguldak.

Muzaffer falls in love with Suzan.

Suzan, who is still a high school student, becomes close friends with two young people, despite her family’s wishes.

But tuberculosis, the plague of the 1940s, increasingly threatens the health of both young people.

Rüştü and Muzaffer try to establish their own future.

But we, their wretched offspring, what do we?

Do not we still taste of the fruit forbid,

Whiles with fond fruitless curiosity

In books profane we seek for knowledge hid?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: Dr. Fausto, Jean Paul Laurens

I think of English writer / teacher Kingsley Amis (16 April 1922 – 1995).

He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism.

Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary work covered many genres – poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery.

Above: Kingsley Amis

Should you revisit us
Stay a little longer
And get to know the place…
On local life we trust
The resident witness
Not the royal tourist.

(“New Approach Needed“, A Look Around the Estate, Kingsley Amis)

Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history.

That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian (perhaps with an eye to Larkin working as a librarian in Hull) and his temptation to adultery.

I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of “abroad“, after Amis’s own travels on the Continent with a young family. 

Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing a young schoolmaster’s courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine. 

“I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone, only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.

Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.“

(The Green Man, Kingsley Amis)

In The Anti-Death League, Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness – in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure – against the demands of any cosmological scheme.

Amis’s religious views appear in a response reported in his Memoirs.

To the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question:

“You atheist?”

Amis replied:

“It’s more that I hate Him.”

Above: Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 – 2017)

I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the “swinging” atmosphere of late-1960s London, in which Amis certainly participated, though neither book is strictly autobiographical. 

Girl, 20, for instance, is set in the world of classical (and pop) music, in which Amis had no part.

The book’s noticeable command of music terminology and opinion shows Amis’s amateur devotion to music and almost journalistic capacity to explore a subject that interested him.

“The real trouble with liars was that there could never be any guarantee against their occasionally telling the truth.“

“It’s human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you’ve left behind.“

(Girl, 20, Kingsley Amis)

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for periodical publication. 

Amis’s opinions on books and people tended to appear, and often were, conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of “the classics” and of traditional morals, but more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgement in all things.

Above: Kingsley Amis

Amis became associated with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which he admired, in the late 1960s, when he began composing critical works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited.

In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier under his own name.

The same year, he wrote The Book of Bond (or Every Man His Own 007), a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym “Lt Col. William (‘Bill’) Tanner“, Tanner being M’s chief of staff in many of Fleming’s novels.

In 1968 Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym “Robert Markham“.

Amis’s literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of The Old Devils, a Booker Prize winner.

Several critics found him old-fashioned and misogynistic.

His Stanley and the Women, an exploration of social sanity, could be said to instance these traits.

Others said that his output lacked his earlier work’s humanity, wit and compassion.

The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction.

Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times:

• Ending Up (1974)
• Jake’s Thing (1978) 
• The Old Devils (1986)

What is this knowledge but the sky-stolen fire

For which the thief still chained in ice doth sit,

And which the poor rude satyr did admire,

And needs would kiss, but burnt his lips with it.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I think of German writer Sarah Kirsch (1935 – 2013).

Sarah Kirsch is considered one of the most important German poets. 

Her poetry is open in form, mostly without rhyme and in free meter.

Nevertheless, rhythm in the sense of the tempo of breathing plays a major role, as do line breaks and line jumps, which create a flow or breathlessness. 

Kirsch often combines technical or old-fashioned expressions with a casual tone.

Characteristic of her metaphors are images that have their starting point in everyday life, nature or landscapes, but are alienated or take a surprising turn.

Kirsch often contrasts precise observation of nature with the emotional life of the lyrical self or political reflection.

While early poems were predominately concerned with war and National Socialism, later landscape poems and reflections on the world crisis of civilization dominate.

Above: Sarah Kirsch

 

What is it but the cloud of empty rain,

Which when Jove’s guest embraced, he monsters got?

Or the false pails which oft being filled with pain,

Received the water, but retained it not?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Shortly, what is it but the fiery coach

Which the youth sought, and sought his death withal?

Or the boy’s wings, which when he did approach

The sun’s hot beams, did melt and let him fall?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: The Fall of Icarus (1637), Jacob Peter Gowy

And yet, alas, when all our lamps are burned,

Our bodies waste, and our spirits spent,

When we have all the learned volumes turned,

Which yield men’s wits both help and ornament,

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

What can we know, or what can we discern,

When error chokes the windows of the mind,

The diverse forms of things, how can we learn,

That have been ever from our birthday blind?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

When reason’s lamp, which like the sun in sky,

Throughout man’s little world her beams did spread,

Is now become a sparkle which doth lie

Under the ashes, half extinct and dead;

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

How can we hope that through the eye and ear

This dying sparkle, in this cloudy place,

Can recollect these beams of knowledge clear,

Which were infused in the first minds by grace?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

So might the heir whose father hath in play

Wasted a thousand pound of ancient rent,

By painful earning of a groat a day

Hope to restore the patrimony spent.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

The wits that dived most deep and soared most high,

Seeking man’s powers, have found his weakness such;

Skill comes so slow and life so fast doth fly,

We learn so little and forget so much.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

For this the wisest of all mortal men

Said, He knew nought but that he nought did know;

And the great mocking master mocked not then,

When he said, Truth was buried deep below.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

For how may we to others’ things attain,

When none of us his own soul understands?

For which the devil mocks our curious brain,

When, Know thyself, his oracle commands.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

For why should we the busy soul believe,

When boldly she concludes of that and this;

When of herself she can no judgment give,

Nor how, nor whence, nor where, nor what she is?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

All things without, which round about we see,

We seek to know, and how therewith to do;

But that whereby we reason, live, and be,

Within ourselves we strangers are thereto.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

We seek to know the moving of each sphere,

And the strange cause of th’ebbs and floods of Nile;

But of that clock within our breasts we bear,

The subtle motions we forget the while.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,

And pass both tropics and behold the poles,

When we come home, are to ourselves unknown,

And unacquainted still with our own souls.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

We study speech, but others we persuade;

We leech-craft learn, but others cure with it;

We interpret laws, which other men have made,

But read not those which in our hearts are writ.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: The Tower of Babel (1563), Peter Bruegel the Elder

Is it because the mind is like the eye,

Through which it gathers knowledge by degrees–

Whose rays reflect not, but spread outwardly–

Not seeing itself when other things it sees?

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

No, doubtless, for the mind can backward cast

Upon herself her understanding light;

But she is so corrupt and so defaced,

As her own image doth herself affright.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: Nosce Te Ipsum (Allegory of Vanity) (1650), Jacob Neefs and Jacob Jordaens

As in the fable of the lady fair,

Which for her lust was turned into a cow:

When thirsty to a stream she did repair,

And saw herself transformed, she wist not how,

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

At first she startles, then she stands amazed,

At last with terror she from thence doth fly,

And loathes the wat’ry glass wherein she gazed,

And shuns it still, though she for thirst do die.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Even so man’s soul, which did God’s image bear,

And was at first fair, good, and spotless pure,

Since with her sins her beauties blotted were,

Doth of all sights her own sight least endure.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

For even at first reflection she espies

Such strange chimeras and such monsters there,

Such toys, such antics, and such vanities,

As she retires and shrinks for shame and fear.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: Alice entering the looking-glass

And as the man loves least at home to be,

That hath a sluttish house haunted with sprites,

So she, impatient her own faults to see,

Turns from herself and in strange things delights.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

For this, few know themselves; for merchants broke

View their estate with discontent and pain,

And seas are troubled when they do revoke

Their flowing waves into themselves again.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

And while the face of outward things we find

Pleasing and fair, agreeable and sweet,

These things transport and carry out the mind,

That with herself herself can never meet.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Yet if affliction once her wars begin,

And threat the feebler sense with sword and fire,

The mind contracts herself and shrinketh in,

And to herself she gladly doth retire,

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

As spiders touched seek their webs’ inmost part,

As bees in storms unto their hives return,

As blood in danger gathers to the heart,

As men seek towns when foes the country burn.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

If aught can teach us aught, affliction’s looks,

Making us look into ourselves so near,

Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books,

Or all the learned schools that ever were.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

This mistress lately plucked me by the ear,

And many a golden lesson hath me taught;

Hath made my senses quick and reason clear,

Reformed my will and rectified my thought.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air;

So working lees settle and purge the wine;

So lopped and prunëd trees do flourish fair;

So doth the fire the drossy gold refine.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Neither Minerva nor the learned muse,

Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise,

Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse,

As but the glance of this dame’s angry eyes.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

Above: Hall of the Augustals (Herculaneum) – Minerva, the goddess of wisdom

She within lists my ranging mind hath brought,

That now beyond myself I list not go;

Myself am center of my circling thought,

Only myself I study, learn, and know.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I know my body’s of so frail a kind

As force without, fevers within, can kill;

I know the heavenly nature of my mind,

But ’tis corrupted both in wit and will;

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I know my soul hath power to know all things,

Yet is she blind and ignorant of all;

I know I am one of nature’s little kings,

Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

I know my life’s a pain and but a span,

I know my sense is mocked with everything;

And to conclude, I know myself a man,

Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

(“Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies)

There are those who suggest that we conform, that we become like everyone else.

Then why were we made as individuals?

Why do we read?

To know that we are not alone in the world.

Why do we write?

To know what we are thinking.

To discover who you are, read poetry.

To discover the magic of your voice, read poetry aloud.

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

And the human race is filled with passion.

And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

To quote from Whitman:

“O me! O life!

Of the questions of these recurring

Of the endless trains of the faithless

Of cities fill’d with the foolish

What good amid these

O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” 

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

What will your verse be?

When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, consider what YOU think.

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Boys, you must strive to find your own voice.

Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.

Thoreau said:

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Don’t be resigned to that.

Break out!

Break out!

Now is the time!“

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Photos

• “Nosce Teipsum / Know Thyself“, John Davies

• “Le vieux soldat canadien“, Octave Crémazie

• “Le drapeau de Carillon“, Octave Crémazie

• The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin

• “Evler“, Behçet Necatigil

• “How to Read Poetry“, Emily McGowan, thegoodtrade.com, 1 April 2020

• How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

• Dead Poets Society, Tom Schulman

• “By the Rivers of Babylon“, Boney M

Beyond Buddy Bears

Beyoğlu, İstanbul, Türkiye

Sunday 7 April 2024

“With the deep unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speak-write towards him.”

With the deep unconscious sigh which not even the closeness of my sleeping companion can prevent me from sighing as I end the day coaxing brilliant thought from muddled mind writing by lamplight in the darkness.

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.”

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.“

Above: The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a Greek manuscript of the Bible from the 5th century, is a palimpsest.

(A palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. 

Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in the interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing.

The term palimpsest is also used to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another.)

Such is the writing of one’s own biography.

The past that was in constant flux must be captured in at least one image to be palatable for the present.

“Books were recalled and rewritten again and again and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.”

“It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.

Statistics were just so much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.”

“And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who coordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified and the other rubbed out of existence.”

Is there, in truth, Truth?

We decide what we choose to remember and invent what is needed for the narrative.

Above: Walter Seymour Allward’s Veritas (Truth) outside the Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

“It struck him as curious that you could create dead people but not living ones.

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically and upon the same evidence as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.“

Above: Obverse of a Charlemagne (748 – 814) denier (a silver coin) coined in Mainz (Germany) (812 – 814), Cabinet des Médailles, Paris

Above: The Tusculum portrait, possibly the only surviving sculpture of Caesar (100 – 44 BC) made during his lifetime, Museum of Antiquities, Torino, Italy

When writing we bring into existence a world that exists only in our minds, for perception of reality is determined by our preferences.

“He opened the diary.

It was important to write something down.”

I was tired of my lady
We’d been together too long
Like a worn out recording
Of a favourite song

So while she lay there sleepin’
I read the paper in bed
And in the personal columns
There was this letter I read

If you like piña coladas
And gettin’ caught in the rain
If you’re not into yoga
If you have half a brain
If you like makin’ love at midnight
In the dunes on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for
Write to me and escape

I didn’t think about my lady
I know that sounds kinda mean
But me and my old lady
Had fallen into the same old dull routine

So I wrote to the paper
Took out a personal ad
And though I’m nobody’s poet
I thought it wasn’t half bad

Yes, I like piña coladas
And gettin’ caught in the rain
I’m not much into health food
I am into champagne
I’ve got to meet you by tomorrow noon
And cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O’Malley’s
Where we’ll plan our escape

So I waited with high hopes
And she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant
I knew the curve of her face

It was my own lovely lady
And she said, “Oh, it’s you”
Then we laughed for a moment
And I said, “I never knew“

“That you like piña coladas
And gettin’ caught in the rain
And the feel of the ocean
And the taste of champagne
If you like making love at midnight
In the dunes on the cape
You’re the lady I’ve looked for
Come with me and escape“

Her energy is infectious.

Her smile warm and delightful.

Her love is “the place where there is no darkness“.

“The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see,, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.”

Above: The amazing Mrs. K

I am a man.

“Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct.”

“Unreasonable hope persisted.”

“I love you.”, we tell one another.

Immediately after we will part, I wll succeed in shutting my wife out of my mind altogether.

When the memory of her face comes back, so too will the raging intolerable desire to be alone.

For until I can be alone, it is impossible to think.

But without her, my soul writhes with boredom.

At the sound or sight of the words “I love you” the desire to stay alive wells up in me.

A kind of fever seizes me at the thought I may lose her.

Life is a restless dream.

I love my wife.

My whole mind and body is afflicted with an unbearble sensitivity, a transparency, wherein every movement, every sound, every image, every touch, every word is an agony.

Even in dreams does she haunt me.

Within moments our hands are clasped together.

I remember every detail of her hand, the long fingers, the battered nails, the creamy soft palm, the smooth flesh beneath her wrist.

The dappled light and shade wage war upon the other as we speed march from the arrivals gate to the street exit, cross the road, find the meeting point for our hotel shuttle and wait to be directed.

Her hair is a pool of gold, such as a dog would dive into, dazzling at sunset.

The air caresses and kisses my skin.

There are no difficulties getting from the airport to the hotel.

A van simulating a limo speeds us through traffic.

Though we offered all manner of luxury – TV, radio, drinks – we merely talk and glance out the window at the passing scene.

Above: SAW – IATA airport code for İstanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport

Her sheer volume of words leaves me breathless.

I hear all that she is saying.

I will remember not a word, except how being with her makes me feel.

Boundless joy, limitless love.

The day is sweet.

Leaves are green.

And though I have evolved into a creature of interiors, I still view, even after two decades as a couple, my wife with sheer incredulity.

I have become too used to living without women.

Above: The fabulous Mrs. K

We will be in İstanbul from today until Monday the Ides of April:

Three nights in Beyoğlu, five nights in Sultanahmet.

Above: Aerial view of the historical peninsula and modern skyline of Istanbul

İstanbul’s “downtown“, Beyoğlu is where the city comes to work, shop and play.

A vast area with boundaries that are hard to define, but for our purposes Beyoğlu is everything up the hill north of the Golden Horn as far as Taksim Square.

The focus, however, is unmistakably İstiklal Caddesi, the broad pedestrianized spine off which spread countless narrow streets.

Since most streets are unsuitable for traffic, the only to explore the various neighbourhoods that make up Beyoğlu is by foot.

Above: İstiklal Avenue in Beyoğlu

Historically, the district went by two different names:

• Galata, for the hillside just north of the Golden Horn
• Pera, denoting ehst id now the lower İstikal Caddesi area

Foreign-occupıed areas since Byzantine times, these were trading colonies across the water from the walls of Constantinople proper, founded by merchants from Italian city states such as Genova and Venezia.

After the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century, it was to Galata that the European powers sent their fist ambassadors.

By the 17th century, Galata / Pera was a substantial city in its own right, with a multi-ethnic population known collectively as “Levantines“.

As well as the Italians, there were many other significant communities, as outlined by a Turkish chronicler of the time:

“The Greeks keep the taverns.

Most of the Armenians are merchants or money changers.

The Jews are the go-between in amorous intrigues and their youth are the worst of all the devotees of debauchery.“

Above: Map of Constantinople (a small part of modern İstanbul), called “the Historic Peninsula” (Tarihi Yarımada) designed in 1422 by Florentine cartographer Cristoforo Buondelmonti (Description des îles de l’archipel, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris) is the oldest surviving map of the city, and the only surviving map which predates the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453

It was during the 19th century that Beyoğlu acquired its present character.

The increased use of iron and brick as building materials instead of the traditional wood made it feasible to construct buildings that could survive the fires that regularly devastated the city.

After the foundation of the Republic in the 1930s, the area officially became known as Beyoğlu and blossomed with new restaurants, theatres and concert halls.

Above: Galata Tower (1348) was built by the Genoese at the northern apex of Galata Citadel.

Older residents still speak wistfully of never daring to go to İstiklal Caddesi without a collar and tie.

Above: İstiklal Caddesi

World War II brought a discriminatory wealth tax that hit the Christians and Jews hard.

(Muslims were exempt.)

Many left for Greece, America or Israel.

In the 1950s and 1960s, political tensions caused most of the remaining Greeks to depart.

In their place came a flood of poor migrants from Anatolia.

Beyoğlu lost its cachet.

Above: Greek shops on İstikal Caddesi in Beyoğlu, 1930s.

By the late 1980s, İstiklal Caddesi and the area around it was run down, sleazy and even a little dangerous.

That began changing in late 1990 after the simple measure of closing the street to traffic and making a pedestrian precinct.

The subsequent transformation has been swift and continues at pace.

Above: The Atatürk Cultural Centre (Atatürk Kültür Merkezi) is the main opera hall in the city, Taksim Meydam, Beyoğlu

If you have the time, it makes sense to spread your exploration of this neighbourhood over a few days.

One day could be spent in Galata, Tophane and Tünel, visiting sights such as the İstanbul Modern and wandering around the fascinating streets.

Above: İstanbul Modern

Another day could be spent walking from Taksim Meydam (Taksim Square) along İstiklal Caddesi, veering off into the districts of Cihangir, Çukurcuma, Asmalmescit and Tepebaşı.

One day start in Taksim Meydam and work your way down İstiklal, exploring the Balik Pazarı, heading into Tepebaşı to visit the Pera Müzesi and then backtracking to İstiklal Caddesi.

Above: A view of Taksim Square with the Monument of the Republic (1928)

Take a break and enjoy a glass of tea at old fashioned outdoor cafés.

If you are in town when a Süper Lig or UEFA match is being played, head to one of the Tophane Nargile cafés to drink tea, smoke a nargile (water pipe) and join the fans in making your team allegiances clear.

Above: Logo of the Union of European Football Associations

To enjoy a million dollar view with a cheap glass of tea, try the ramshackle çay bahçesis at the edge of the Bosphorous opposite the Fındıkh tram stop.

“At last came glimmering through the veil some whitish spots, then the vague outline of a great height, then the scattered and vivid glitter of window panes shining in the sun, and finally Galata and Pera in full light, a mountain of many coloured houses, one above the other.

A lofty city crowned with minarets, cupolas and cypresses.

Upon the summit the monumental palaces of the different embassies and the great Tower of Galata.

At the foot the vast arsenal of Tophane and a forest of ships.

And as the fog receded, the city lengthened rapidly along the Bosphorus.

And quarter after quarter started forth stretching from the hilltops down to the sea, vast, thiickly sown with houses and dotted with white mosques, rows of ships, little ports, palaces rising from the water.

Pavilions, gardens, kiosks, groves.

And dimly seen in the mist beyond, the sun-gilded summits of still other quarters.

A glow of colours, an exuberance of verdure, a perspective of lovely views, a grandeur, a delight, a grace to call forth the wildest exclamations.”

(Edmondo de Amicis, 1875)

Above: Italian novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer Edmondo De Amicis (1846 – 1908)

Best as I can figure, Istanbul has nine European districts and six Asian districts.

On the European side, two districts are considered to be the historic city centre areas: Fatih and Beyoğlu.

Above: Logo of Metropolitan İstanbul

Beyoğlu is a municipality and district of İstanbul Province.

Its area is 9 km².

Its population is 225,920.

It is on the European side of İstanbul, separated from the old city (historic peninsula of Constantinople) by the Golden Horn.

It was known as the region of Pera (meaning “Beyond” in Greek) surrounding the ancient coastal town Galata which faced Constantinople across the Horn.

Beyoğlu continued to be named Pera during the Middle Ages and, in western languages, into the early 20th century.

“This city, now as always, is the mysterious seal which unites Europe to Asia.

If, outwardly, it is the most beautıful city in the world, one may criticize, as so many travellers have done, the poverty of certain quarters and the filthiness of many others.

Constantinople is like the scenery in a theatre:

It must be looked at from the front without going behind the scenes.

There are finical Englishmen who are content to go round Seraglio Point and down the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus and then say:

“I have seen everything worth seeing.”

That is going too far.

But we may perhaps regret that Stamboul, which has partly lost its former appearance, is not yet, either from the point of view of healthiness or public order, comparable to the capitals of Europe.

It is doubtless very difficult to make regular streets on the hills of Stamboul and the lofty promontories of Pera and Scutari, but they could be made with a better system of construction and paving.

The painted houses, the zinc domes, the tapering minarets are always charming to a poet.”

(Gérard de Nerval, 1843)

Above: French writer, poet and translator Gérard Labrunie (aka Gérard de Nerval) (1808 – 1855)

According to the prevailing theory, the Turkish name of Pera, Beyoğlu, meaning “son of a Bey“ in Ottoman Turkish, is a modification by folk etymology of the Venetian title of Bailo.

The 15th century ambassador of Venice in Istanbul, Andrea Gritti (1455 – 1538), had a mansion in this area.

Above: 77th Doge of Venezia Andrea Gritti (1455 – 1538), Titian (1550), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Located further south in Beyoğlu and originally built in the early 16th century, the “Venetian Palace” was the seat of the Bailo.

The original palace building was replaced by the existing one in 1781, which later became the Italian Embassy following Italian unification in 1861, and the Italian Consulate in 1923, when Ankara became the capital of the Republic of Turkey.

Above: The Venetian Palace, Beyoğlu

Once a predominantly Christian (Armenians, Greeks and Turkish Levantine) neighbourhood, its population today mostly consists of Turks and Kurds who moved there after the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 and after the İstanbul pogrom in 1955.

Above: Turkish mob attacking Greek property , 6 – 7 September 1955

(The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots, were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at İstanbul’s Greek minority.

The events were triggered by the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece –the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 – 1938) was born.

The bomb was actually planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed.

The Turkish press was silent about the arrest.

Instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.

A Turkish mob, most of whose members were trucked into the city in advance, assaulted Istanbul’s Greek community for nine hours.

Although the mob did not explicitly call for the killing of Greeks, over a dozen people died during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson. 

Armenians and Jews were also harmed.

The police were mostly ineffective.

The violence continued until the government declared martial law in İstanbul, called in the army and ordered it to put down the riots.

The material damage was estimated at US$500 million, including the burning of churches and the devastation of shops and private homes.)

“From the foot of the Tower of Galata with Constantinople before me, its Bosphorus and its seas, again I turn my gaze towards Egypt, long vanished from my sight.

Beyond the peaceful horizon which surrounds me, over this land of Europe, Mussulman indeed, but already like my own homeland, I still feel the glory of that distant mirage which flames and raises clouds of dust in my memory, like the image of the sun which, when one has gazed upon it fixedly, pursues the tired eye, though it has plunged into the shade again.

My surroundings add force to this impression:

A Turkish cemetery, beneath the walls of Galata the Genoese.

Behind me is an Armenian barber’s shop, which is also a café.

And huge red and yellow dogs, lying on the grass in the sun, covered with wounds and scars from their nightly battles.

On my left a genuine santon, wearing his felt hat, sleeping that sleep of the blest which is for him a foreshadowing of Paradise.

Down below is Tophana, with its mosque, its fountain and its batteries of guns commanding the entrance to the harbour.

From time to time I hear the psalms of the Greek liturgy chanted by nasal voices.

And over the road which goes to Pera I see long funeral processions led by popes who wear upon their brows crowns of imperial shape.

With their long beards, their robes of spangled silk and their ornaments of imitation jewels, they look like phantoms of the sovereigns of the Later Empire.”

(Gérard de Nerval, 1843)

Above: Roman Catholic church of St. Anthony of Padua, Beyoğlu

The district encompasses other neighborhoods located north of the Golden Horn, including Galata (the medieval Genoese citadel from which Beyoğlu itself originated, which is today known as Karaköy), Tophane, Cihangir, Şişhane, Tepebaşı, Tarlabaşı, Dolapdere and Kasımpaşa.

Beyoğlu is connected to the old city center across the Golden Horn through the Galata Bridge, Atatürk Bridge and the Golden Horn Metro Bridge.

Beyoğlu is the most active art, entertainment and nightlife centre of Istanbul.

“Water, camels, sand.

Then broader water, boats, a little station, with a veiled woman standing in a doorway.

Then more water and sandy grass, a few trees.

Then, between the railway and the water, a cluster of coloured houses, mostly of wood.

Then trees, more wasteland, a little bay, with hills beyond.

Then fields, more clusters of mean houses, ploughed land and water.

At last, the wall, with its gaps and towers.

A graveyard, gardens.

Then between roofs and walls, the long curve of Constantinople.

A dense smell, dogs, houses.

Then an actual seashore, with men wading barelegged in the water and boats coming in laden with melons.

Then streets of houses, with fragments of turreted walls, two birds on every turret.

Side streets, cutting deeply between two lines of red roofs.

Faces of many colours, strange clothes.

Then, over the roofs, but close, the water, houses, domes, minarets of the city.

In a flash, veiled suddenly by the walls of the station, fastened about one.”

(Arthur Symons, 1903)

Above: British poet, critic, translator and magazine editor Arthur Symons (1865 – 1945)

The area now known as Beyoğlu has been inhabited since Byzas founded the city of Byzantium in the 7th century BC.

Beyoğlu predates the founding of Constantinople.

Above: Coinage with idealized depiction of Byzas, the legendary founder of Byzantium, around the time of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180).

During the Byzantine era, Greek speaking inhabitants named the hillside covered with orchards Sykai (the fig orchard), or Peran en Sykais (the fig field on the other side), referring to the “other side” of the Golden Horn.

As the Byzantine Empire grew, so did Constantinople and its environs.

The northern side of the Golden Horn became built up as a suburb of Byzantium as early as the 5th century.

In this period the area began to be called Galata.

Above: The empire in 555 under Justinian the Great (482 – 565), at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire (its vassals in pink)

Emperor Theodosius II (401 – 450) (reigned 402–450) built a fortress.

Above: Bust of Byzantine Empreror Theodosius II (401 – 450), Louvre Museum, Paris

The Greeks believe that the name comes either from galatas (meaning “milkman“), as the area was used by shepherds in the early medieval period, or from the word Galatai (meaning “Gauls“), as the Celtic tribe of Gauls were thought to have camped here during the Hellenistic period before settling into Galatia in central Anatolia, becoming known as the Galatians.

The inhabitants of Galatia are famous for the Epistle to the Galatians and the Dying Galatian statue.

Above: The Dying Galatian, Capitoline Museums, Rome

The name may have also derived from the Italian word Calata, meaning “downward slope“, as Galata, formerly a colony of the Republic of Genova (1273 – 1453), stands on a hilltop that goes downwards to the sea.

Above: Flag of the Repubblica di Genoa (1099 – 1797)

“Those Turks, who are not very rigid in the observance of the laws of Mahomet and who wish to drink wine or spirits, do it I believe secretly or go to the French coffeehouses at Pera, where their intemperance is not observed.

But I entirely differ from many travellers, who tell us that the major part of the Turks drink fermented liquors.

I aver that no people in the world adhere more rigidly to the injunctions of their religion in that and other respects.

Those who take forbidden drinks are generally soldiers, Tartars and persons of the lowest class.

The effects of spirituous liquors on the Turks are remarkable.

Naturally sedate, composed and amicable, they become, when intoxicated, downright madmen.

And the inhabitants of Pera, who are accustomed to see them in this state, know well the danger of getting in their way at such a moment that they avoid them as they would a mad bull.”

(Lady Hester Stanhope, 1811)

Above: British adventurer, writer, antıquarian and one of the most famous travellers of her age Lady Hester Stanhope (1776 – 1839)

Her excavation of Ascalon in 1815 is considered the first to use modern archaeological principles, and her use of a medieval Italian document is described as “one of the earliest uses of textual sources by field archaeologists“.

Her letters and memoirs made her famous as an explorer.

The area came to be the base of European merchants, particularly from Genova and Venezia, in what was then known as Pera.

Following the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and during the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204 – 1261), the Venetians became more prominent in Pera.

Above: A 15th-century miniature depicting the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204

The Dominican Church of St. Paul (1233), today known as the Arap Camii, is from this period.

Above: Arap Camii (mosque), Beyoğlu

“The foreign ambassadors and consuls have their quarters here.

The gorgeous palaces of successful Greek, Armenian and Hebrew financiers are also here.

And most of the hotels for Europeans and Americans are in Pera.

The streets are as narrow and badly paved as in Stamboul, but the slopes of the hills and the wealth and position of the inhabitants tend to give the place a hygienic aspect not discerned in other parts of Constantinople.

Galata is at the base of the hill on which Pera is located and it fronts on both the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus.

It is the business and shipping centre for the Europeans.

It has been well characterized to see Galata as the fermenting vat of the scum of the Earth.”

(Will Seymour Monroe, 1907)

Above: American educator William Seymour Monroe (1863 – 1939)

In 1273, the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1224 – 1282) granted Pera to the Republic of Genova in recognition of Genova’s support of the Empire after the Fourth Crusade and the sacking of Constantinople in 1204.

Pera became a flourishing trade colony, ruled by a podesta (chief magistrate).

Above: 1350 Miniature of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1224 – 1282), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München

The Genoese Palace (Palazzo del Comune) was built in 1316 by Montano de Marinis, the Podesta of Galata (Pera), and still remains today in ruins, near Bankalar Caddesi (Banks Street) in Karaköy, along with its adjacent buildings and numerous Genoese houses from the early 14th century.

In 1348, the Genoese built the famous Galata Tower, one of the most prominent landmarks of Istanbul.

Above: The Genoese Palace (1314) in the foreground, with the Galata Tower (1348) in the background

Pera (Galata) remained under Genoese control until 29 May 1453, when it was conquered by the Ottomans along with the rest of the city, after the Siege of Constantinople (6 April – 29 May 1453).

Above: The siege of Constantinople (1453), French miniature by Jean Le Tavernier after 1455

During the Byzantine period, the Genoese Podesta ruled over the Italian community of Galata (Pera), which was mostly made up of the Genoese, Venetians, Tuscans and Ragusans.

Above: Palazzo del Podestà in Firenze, now the Museo Palazzo del Bargello 

Venezia, Genova’s archrival, regained control in the strategic citadel of Galata (Pera), which they were forced to leave in 1261 when the Byzantines retook Constantinople and brought an end to the Latin Empire (1204 – 1261) that was established by Enrico Dandolo (1107 – 1205), the Doge of Venice.

Above: Flag of the Repubblica di Venezia (697 – 1797)

Above: Coat of arms of the Latin Empire (1204 – 1261)

Above: Doge Enrico Dandolo (1107 – 1205) (left) is depicted along with St. Mark in the obverse of this Venetian “grosso“, currency first introduced during his administration

Following the Turkish siege of Constantinople in 1453, during which the Genoese sided with the Byzantines and defended the city together with them, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (1432 – 1481) allowed the Genoese (who had fled to their colonies in the Aegean Sea) to return to the city, but Galata was no longer run by a Genoese Podestà.

Above: Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (1432 – 1481)

Venezia immediately established political and commercial ties with the Ottoman Empire.

A Venetian Bailo was sent to Pera as an ambassador, during the Byzantine period.

It was the Venetians who suggested Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) to Bayezid II (1447 – 1512) when the Sultan mentioned his intention to construct a bridge over the Golden Horn.

Above: Italian painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)

Above: Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1447 – 1512)

Leonardo designed his Galata Bridge in 1502.

Above: Galata Bridge

By the 17th century, Galata / Pera was a substantial city in its own right, with a multi-ethnic population known collectively as “Levantines”.

As well as the Italians, there were many other significant communities, as outlined by a Turkish chronicler of the time:

“The Greeks keep the tavernas.

Most of the Armenians are merchants or money-changers.

The Jews are the go-between in amorous intrigues.

Their youths are the worst of all the devotees of debauchery.”

Above: View of Galata

The Bailo’s seat was the “Venetian Palace“, originally built in Beyoğlu in the early 16th century and replaced by the existing palace building in 1781.

It later became the “Italian Embassy” after the unification of Italy in 1861, and the “Italian Consulate” in 1923, when Ankara became the new Turkish capital.

Above: Flag of Italy

The Ottoman Empire had an interesting relationship with the Republic of Venezia.

Even though the two states often went to war over the control of East Mediterranean territories and islands, they were keen on restoring their trade pacts once the wars were over, such as the renewed trade pacts of 1479, 1503, 1522, 1540 and 1575 following major sea wars between the two sides.

The Venetians were also the first Europeans to taste Ottoman delicacies such as coffee, centuries before other Europeans saw coffee beans for the first time in their lives during the Battle of Vienna (Wien) in 1683.

Above: Battle of Vienna (Wien), 14 July to 12 September 1683

These encounters can be described as the beginning of today’s rich “coffee culture” in both Venezia (and later the rest of Italy) and Wien.

Above: Viennese coffeehouse

Following the conquest of Constantinople and Pera in 1453, the coast and the low-lying areas were quickly settled by the Turks, but the European presence in the area did not end.

Several Roman Catholic churches, as St. Anthony of Padua, St. Peter and St. Paul in Galata and St. Mary Draperis were established for the needs of the Levantine population.

Above: Entrance to the courtyard of St. Peter’s Church in Beyoğlu

“Taxim, a busy quarter on the heights of Pera:

European carriages and clothes jostling with the carriages and costumes of the Orient.

Blazing heat and blazing sun.

A mild breeze throws the dust and the yellowed leaves of August up in the air.

The scent of the myrtles.

The din of the fruit sellers.

Streets cluttered with grapes and watermelons.

The very first moments of my sojourn in Constantinople etch these images in my memory.

Being a total stranger, I would spend my afternoons beside the Taxim road, sitting in the breeze, under the trees.

As I let myself drift back over the period that had just ended, my eyes absently followed the cosmopolitan stream in front of me.”

(Pierre Loti, 1876)

Above: French naval officer and novelist Louis Marie-Julien Viaud (aka Pierre Loti) (1850 – 1923)

It was during the 19th century that the area acquired its present character.

The increased use of iron and brick as building materials instead of the traditional wood made it feasible to construct buildings that could survive the fires that regularly devastated the city.

During the 19th century it was again home to many European traders and housed many embassies, especially along the Grande Rue de Péra (today İstiklâl Caddesi).

Above: Nostalgic tram on İstiklal Caddesi, Beyoğlu

Reyhan Zetler stated:

“Pera was considered to be a small copy of the 19^th century Europe (especially Paris and London).” 

Above: A reception held at the Naum Theatre (1839 – 1870) in honour of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807 – 1882), who had lived and worked (as a teacher) in the Pera district between 1828 and 1831.

The Naum Theatre seen in this illustration served as the chief opera house of Constantinople, until it was destroyed by a fire in 1870.

The presence of such a prominent European population – commonly referred to as Levantines – made it the most Westernized part of Constantinople, especially when compared to the Old City at the other side of the Golden Horn, and allowed for influxes of modern technology, fashion and arts.

Thus, Pera was one of the first parts of Constantinople to have telephone lines, electricity, trams, municipal government and even an underground railway, the Tünel, inaugurated in 1875 as the world’s second subway line (after London’s Underground) to carry the people of Pera up and down from the port of Galata and the nearby business and banking district of Karaköy, where the Bankalar Caddesi (Avenue of the Banks), the financial center of the Ottoman Empire, is located.

Above: Karaköy station of the Tünel funicular in Istanbul, Turkey

The theatre, cinema, patisserie and café culture that still remains strong in Beyoğlu dates from this late Ottoman period.

Shops like İnci, famous for its chocolate mousse and profiteroles, predate the founding of the Republic and have survived until recently.

Pera and Galata in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a part of the Municipality of the Sixth Circle (Municipalité du VI^ème Cercle), established under the laws of 11 Jumada al-Thani and 24 Shawwal 1274, in 1858.

The organization of the central city in the city walls, “Stamboul” (İstanbul), was not affected by these laws.

All of Constantinople was in the Prefecture of the City of Constantinople (Préfecture de la Ville de Constantinople).

The foreign communities also built their own schools, many of which went on to educate the elite of future generations of Turks, and still survive today as some of the best schools in Istanbul.

The rapid modernization which took place in Europe and left Ottoman Turkey behind was symbolized by the differences between Beyoğlu, and the historic Turkish quarters such as Eminönü and Fatih across the Golden Horn, in the Old City.

When the Ottoman sultans finally initiated a modernization program with the Edict of Tanzimat (Reorganization) in 1839, they started constructing numerous buildings in Pera that mixed traditional Ottoman styles with newer European ones.

In addition, Sultan Abdülmecid stopped living in Topkapı Palace and built a new palace near Pera, called the Dolmabahçe Palace, which blended Neo-Classical, Baroque and Rococo styles.

Above: Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid (1823 – 1861)

Above: Topkapı Palace, Istanbul

Above: A view of Dolmabahçe Palace from the Bosporus (Strait of İstnbul)

“My house in Pera was situated in a secluded spot overlooking the Golden Horn and the distant panorama of the Turkish city.

The splendour of summer lent charm to my abode.

Seated by my large open window, studying the language of Islam, I would let my gaze hover above old Stamboul lying bathed in sunlight.

Away in the background, in a grove of cypress trees, Eyoub came into view.

It would have been Heaven to be hidden with her there in that mystical forgotten place where our life would have lit upon its own strangely delightful setting.

All around my house were immense stretches of land with nothing but cypresses and tombs – empty terrain where I spent more than one night with my mind bent on careless adventures with Armenian or Greek girls.

Midnight!

The fifth hour, according to Turkish clocks.

The night watchmen are striking the ground with their heavy ironshod staves.

In the Galata quarter the dogs are in revolt and the howling down there is appalling.

The dogs in this neighbourhood remain strictly neutral and I am obliged to them for that.

They are asleep hodge-podge outside my door.

All is peace and quiet.

In three hours I have spent stretched out by my open window I have been watching the lights go out one by one.

Yet all is quiet in Constantinople.

At 11 o’clock, some cavalry and artillery went past my house at the gallop, heading for Stamboul.

Then from the batteries came muffled rumbling which petered out in the distance and then everything fell silent again.

Owls are hooting in among the cypresses.

They sound exactly as they do at home.

I love this sound of summertime.

It takes me back to woods in Yorkshire, to the beautiful evenings I spent under the trees at Brightbury.

Here, surrounded by all this stillness, images of the past come alive again, images of all that is shattered and gone, never to return.”

(Pierre Loti, 1876)

Above: Portrait of Pierre Loti, Henri Rousseau, 1891

“At his best Pierre Loti was unquestionably the finest descriptive writer of the day.

In the delicate exactitude with which he reproduced the impression given to his own alert nerves by unfamiliar forms, colors, sounds and perfumes, he was without a rival.

But he was not satisfied with this exterior charm.

He desired to blend with it a moral sensibility of the extremest refinement, at once sensual and ethereal.

Many of his best books are long sobs of remorseful memory, so personal, so intimate, that an English reader is amazed to find such depth of feeling compatible with the power of minutely and publicly recording what is felt.

In spite of the beauty and melody and fragrance of Loti’s books his mannerisms are apt to pall upon the reader, and his later books of pure description were rather empty.

His greatest successes were gained in the species of confession, half-way between fact and fiction, which he essayed in his earlier books.

When all his limitations, however, have been rehearsed, Pierre Loti remains, in the mechanism of style and cadence, one of the most original and most perfect French writers of the second half of the 19th century.“

(English poet, author and critic Edmund Gosse)(1849 – 1928)

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Turkish Republic was founded (during and after WW1) Pera, which became known as Beyoğlu in English in the modern era, went into gradual decline.

After the foundation of the Republic in the 1930s, the area officially became known as “Beyoğlu” and blossomed with new restaurants, theatres and concert halls.

Older residents still speak wistfully of never daring to go to İstiklal Caddesi without a collar and tie.

World War Two brought a discriminatory wealth tax that hit the Christians and the Jews hard.

(Muslims were exampt.)

Many left for Greece, America or Israel

Decline accelerated with the departure of the large Greek population of Beyoğlu and adjacent Galata as a result of Turkish pressure over the Cyprus conflict, during the 1950s and 1960s.

Above: Flag of Cyprus

The widespread political violence between leftist and rightist groups which troubled Turkey in the late 1970s also severely affected the lifestyle of the district, and accelerated its decline with the flight of the middle-class citizens to newer suburban areas such as Levent and Yeşilköy.

In their place came a flood of poor migrants from Anatolia.

Beyoğlu lost its cachet.

Above: A distant view of Levent’s skyline from the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul

Above: Aerial view of the Yeşilköy (San Stefano) seafront

By the late 1980s, many of the grandiose Neoclassical and Art Nouveau apartment blocks, formerly the residences of the late Ottoman élite, became home to immigrants from the countryside.

While Beyoğlu continued to enjoy a reputation for its cosmopolitan and sophisticated atmosphere until the 1940s and 1950s, by the 1980s the area had become economically and socially troubled.

By the late 1980s, İstiklal Caddesi and the area around it was run-down, sleazy and even a little dangerous.

That began changing in late 1990 after the simple measure of closing the street for traffic and making it a pedestrian precinct.

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed the rapid gentrification of these neighborhoods.

Istiklal Avenue has once again become a destination for tourists, and formerly bohemian neighborhoods like Cihangir have once again become fashionable and quite expensive.

Some 19th and early 20th century buildings have been tastefully restored, while others have been converted into mammoth luxury malls of dubious aesthetic value. 

As newer, more international and affluent residents have begun to creep down the hills into Tophane and Tarlabasi, disagreements with more conservative elements in the neighborhoods have become common.

The low-lying areas such as Tophane, Kasımpaşa and Karaköy, and the side streets of the area consist of older buildings.

“I live in a place that very well represents the Tower of Babel.

Above: The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

¹ Now the whole Earth had one language and the same words. 

² And as they migrated from the East, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 

³ And they said to one another:

“Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly.”

And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. 

⁴ Then they said:

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

Otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole Earth.” 

⁵ The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 

⁶ And the LORD said:

“Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do.

Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 

⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 

⁸ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the Earth, and they left off building the city. 

⁹ Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused (balal) the language of all the Earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the Earth.

(Genesis 11: 1 – 9)

In Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Sclavonian, Walachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian.

And what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoken in my own family.

My grooms are Arab.

My footmen French, English and Germans.

My nurse an Armenian.

My housemaids Russians.

Half a dozen other servants, Greeks.

My steward an Italian.

My janizaries Turks.

So that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here, for they learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it.

There are very few men, women or even children here that have not the same compass of words in five or six of them.”

(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1716)

Above:  English aristocrat, medical pioneer, writer and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont) (1689 – 1762)

Foreigners, especially from Euro-Mediterranean and West European countries, have long resided in Beyoğlu.

There is a cosmopolitan atmosphere in the heart of the district, where people from various cultures live in Cihangir and Gümüşsuyu.

Above: Cihangir, Beyoğlu

Beyoğlu also has a number of historical Tekkes (tombs) and Türbes (mausoleums).

Several Sufi orders, such as the Cihangirî (pronounced Jihangiri) order, were founded here.

Most of the consulates (former embassies until 1923, when Ankara became the new Turkish capital) are still in this area.

The Italian, British, German, Greek, Russian, Dutch and Swedish consulates are significant in terms of their history and architecture.

Above: Flag of the European Union

Beyoğlu is also home to many high schools.

The unique international art project United Buddy Bears was presented in Beyoðlu during the winter of 2004 – 2005.

Buddy Bears are painted, life-size fiberglass bear sculptures developed by German businesspeople Klaus and Eva Herlitz, in cooperation with sculptor Roman Strobl.

They have become a landmark of Berlin and are considered unofficial ambassadors of Germany.

The outstretched arms of the standing Buddy Bear symbolise friendliness and optimism.

The first bears were displayed at an artistic event in Berlin in 2001.

The first activities were presented as the Buddy Bear Berlin Show.

In 2001, artists painted approximately 350 bears to appear as decorative elements in the streets of Berlin.

Four different bear designs (one standing on all four paws, one standing on two legs, one standing on its head, and one in a sitting position) were placed in the historic centre of Berlin.

Afterwards, many of the bears were sold at auctions in aid of local child relief nonprofits.

Nowadays, these Berlin Buddy Bears are exclusively presented on private premises, in front of hotels and embassies, as well as in the foyers of various office buildings.

There have been exhibitions of the original Buddy Bears — designed by local artists — in the cities of Shanghai (China) (2004), Buenos Aires (Argentina) (2005), and St. Gallen (Switzerland) (2006).

United Buddy Bears is an international art exhibition with more than 140 2-meter (6 ft 7 in)-tall fiberglass bears.

Under the motto: “We have to get to know each other better, it makes us understand one another better, trust each other more, and live together more peacefully“, more than 140 countries acknowledged by the United Nations (UN) are represented, promoting “tolerance, international understanding and the great concept of different nations and cultures living in peace and harmony“.

The bears stand “hand in hand” in a “peaceful circle” (The Art of Tolerance).

Above: Flag of the United Nations

The bears were on display between June and November 2002, in a circle around the Brandenburg Gate.

Around 1.5 million people visited this first exhibition.

On 6 November 2002, the bears were moved to new locations, including their respective countries’ embassies in Berlin, or back to the country that they were based on.

Above: Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

Some of the bears were auctioned off to raise money for UNICEF.

Above: Emblem of the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund

After the success of the first exhibition, a new circle was created in 2003.

The idea was to send the circle on a global tour. 

The circle changes when it reaches a new city, as the bears are always set up in alphabetic order, following the local language of the host country.

Entry to the exhibitions is always free.

In every metropolis, the United Buddy Bears exhibitions are supported by the government, the foreign ministries, the mayors, local nonprofits, and UNICEF.)

Above: United Buddy Bears, İstanbul, 2004 – 2005

The main thoroughfare is İstiklal Caddesi, running into the neighbourhood from Taksim Square, a pedestrianised 1 mile (1.6 km) long street of shops, cafés, patisseries, restaurants, pubs, winehouses and clubs, as well as bookshops, theatres, cinemas and art galleries.

Some of İstiklâl Avenue has a 19th-century metropolitan character.

The avenue is lined with Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings.

The nostalgic tram which runs on İstiklal Avenue, between Taksim Square and Tünel, was also re-installed in the early 1990s with the aim of reviving the historic atmosphere of the district.

Some of the city’s historic pubs and winehouses are located in the areas around İstiklal Avenue (İstiklal Caddesi) in Beyoğlu.

Above: Taksim Square entrance of İstiklal Caddesi, Beyoğlu

The 19th century Ciçek Pasajı (Flower Passage in Turkish, or Cité de Péra in French), opened in 1876 on İstiklal Avenue.

It can be described as a miniature version of the famous Galleria in Milano, Italy, and has rows of historic pubs, winehouses and restaurants.

Above: Çiçek Pasajı (Flower Passage), also known by its French name Cité de Péra, is one of the many historic buildings that adorn İstiklal Caddesi

The site of Çiçek Pasajı was originally occupied by the Naum Theatre (1844 – 1876), which was burned during the great fire of Pera in 1870. 

Above: Italian musician / Naum Theatre director Giuseppe Donizetti Pasha (1788 – 1856)

The theatre was frequently visited by Sultans Abdülaziz (1830 – 1876) and Abdülhamid II (1842 – 1918).

Above: Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz (1830 – 1876)

Above: Ottoman Sultan Abdül Hamid II (1842 – 1918)

The Theatre hosted Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813 – 1901) play Il Trovatore before the opera houses of Paris.

Above: Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901)

 

After the fire of 1870, the Theatre was purchased by the local Greek banker Hristaki Zoğrafos (1820 – 1898).

Architect Kleanthis Zannos designed the current building, which was called Cité de Péra or Hristaki Pasajı in its early years.

Above: Greek banker Christakis Zografos

Yorgo’nun Meyhanesi (Yorgo’s Winehouse) was the first winehouse to be opened in the passage. 

In 1908 the Ottoman Grand Vizier Sait Paşa purchased the building.

It became known as the Sait Paşa Passage. 

Above: Ottoman governor Mirza Said Mehmed Paşa (1838 – 1914) Ottoman soldier

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, many impoverished noble Russian women, including a Baroness, sold flowers here. 

By the 1940s the building was mostly occupied by flower shops, hence the present Turkish name Çiçek Pasajı (Flower Passage). 

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991)ü

Following the restoration of the building in 1988, it was reopened as a galleria of pubs and restaurants.

Above: Çiçek Passage, Beyoglu

Pano, established by Panayotis Papadopoulos in 1898, and the neighbouring Viktor Levi, established in 1914, are among the oldest winehouses in the city and are located on Kalyoncu Kulluk Street near the British Consulate and Galatasaray Square. 

Cumhuriyet Meyhanesi (literally Republic Winehouse), renamed in the early 1930s but originally established in the early 1890s, is another popular historic winehouse and is located in the nearby Sahne Street, along with the Hazzopulo Winehouse, established in 1871, inside the Hazzopulo Pasajı which connects Sahne Street and Meşrutiyet Avenue.

The famous Nevizade Street, which has rows of historic pubs next to each other, is also in this area.

Other historic pubs are found in the areas around Tünel Pasajı and the nearby Asmalımescit Street.

Above: Tünel Pasajı, Beyoğlu

Above: Asmalımescit Sokak, Beyoğlu

Some historic neighbourhoods around İstiklal Avenue have recently been recreated, such as Cezayir Street near Galatasaray High School, which became known as La Rue Française and has rows of Francophone pubs, cafés and restaurants playing live French music. 

Above: Cezayir Sokağı, Beyoğlu

Artiste Terasse (Artist Teras) on Cezayir Street is a popular restaurant-bar which offers panoramic views of the Hagia Sophia, Topkapı Palace, Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Galata Tower.

Throughout Beyoğlu, there are many night clubs for all kinds of tastes.

There are restaurants on the top of historic buildings with a view of the city. 

Above: Artiste Terasse, Beyoğlu

Asmalımescit Street has rows of traditional Turkish restaurants and Ocakbaşı (grill) houses, while the streets around the historic Balıkpazarı (Fish Market) is full of eateries offering seafood like fried mussels and calamari along with beer or rakı or the traditional kokoreç.

Above: Asmalımescit Sokak, Beyoğlu

Above: Balık Pazarı (Fish Market), Beyoğlu

Beyoğlu also has many elegant pasaj (passages) from the 19th century, most of which have historic and classy chocolateries and patisseries along with many shops lining their alleys.

There is also a wide range of fast-food restaurants in the district.

Apart from the hundreds of shops lining the streets and avenues of the district, there is also a business community. 

Above: Cezayir Street, also known as Rue Française, is famous for its pubs and restaurants playing live music, Beyoğlu

Odakule, a 1970s high rise building (the first “structural expressionism” style building in Turkey) is the headquarters of İstanbul Sanayi Odası (ISO) (Istanbul Chamber of Industry) and is located between İstiklal Avenue and Tepebaşı, next to the Pera Museum.

Most of the upper floors of the buildings in Beyoğlu are office space.

Small workshops are found on the side streets.

Above: Odakule, Beyoğlu

İstanbul Modern, located near Karaköy Port on the Bosphorus, frequently hosts the exhibitions of renowned Turkish and foreign artists.

Pera Museum exhibits some of the works of art from the late Ottoman period, such as the Kaplumbağa Terbiyecisi (Turtle Trainer) by Osman Hamdi Bey (1842 – 1910).

Apart from its permanent collection, the Museum also hosts visiting exhibitions, which included the works of renowned artists such as Rembrandt (1606 – 1669).

Above: Pera Museum, Beyoğlu

Above: The Tortoise Trainer (1906), Osman Hamdi Bey, Pera Museum, Beyoğlu

Above: Turkish artist Osman Hamdi Bey (1842 – 1910)

Above: Self portrait of Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669)

Doğançay Museum, Turkey’s first contemporary art museum dedicated to the works of a single artist, officially opened its doors to the public in 2004.

While the museum almost exclusively displays the works of its founder Burhan Doğançay (1929 – 2013), a contemporary artists, one floor has been set aside for the works of the artist’s father, Adil Doğançay.

Above: Doğançay Museum, Beyoğlu

Hotel Pera Palace was built in the district in 1892 for hosting the passengers of the Orient Express (1883 – 2009). 

Above: Hotel Pera Palace, Beyoğlu

Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976) wrote the novel Murder on the Orient Express in this hotel.

Her room has been preserved as a museum.

Above: Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976)

San Antonio di Padova, the largest Catholic church in Turkey, and the Neve Shalom Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Turkey, are also in Beyoğlu.

Above: Interior of San Antonio di Padova, Beyoğlu

Above: Neve Şalom Synagogue, Beyoğlu

There are other important Catholic and Orthodox churches in the area, such as the Saint Mary Draperis Church or the centrally located Hagia Triada Church at the conjunction point between İstiklal Caddesi and Taksim Square.

It is the seat of the Chaldean Catholic Archparchy of Diyarbakir.

Above: Church of Santa Maria Draperis, Beyoğlu

Above: Hagia Triada Greek Orthodox Church, Beyoğlu

The only Jewish Museum of Turkey, which has been converted from a synagogue, is located in the Karaköy quarter.

İstikal Caddesi is also located in the historic Beyoğlu (Pera) district.

The famous street with shops, cafes, cinemas and other venues stretches for 1.4 kilometres (0.87 mi) and hosts up to three million people each day.

Above: İstiklal Caddesi, Beyoğul

The 1948-opened Atlas Cinema is situated in a 1877-built historic building at Istiklal Caddesi.

Above: Atlas Sineması, İstanbul Sinema Müzesi, Beyoğlu

If you don’t know Çetin İkmen, he is a fastidious Turkish police inspector, small and thin with a sunken face.

He teeters on the edge of alcoholicism, chain smokes and swears in a whisky and cigarettes voice.

As it happens, Ikmen has a cousin who is a transvestite fortune teller.

Ikmen occasionally seeks his help in the frequently convoluted and macabre cases that come his way.

Above: Haluk Bilginer as Çetin İkmen, The Turkish Detective

A strange and complicated character then, the inspector takes the lead in six novels by London-born author Barbara Nadel.

Above: British writer Barbara Nadel

Ever more to the fore than İkmen in Nadel’s books is İstanbul, which is the setting shared by all her stories to date.

The city permeates every page.

Her descriptions of neighbourhoods, landmarks and locations are as precise and exact as those of a travel writer.

İkmen works out of a police station on Yerebatan Caddesi near the underground cistern in Sultanahmet.

He lives nearby on Ticarethane Sokak, just off Divan Yolu.

Above: Yerebatan Sarnıcı, Fatih, Sultanahmet District

Nadel’s first novel, Belshazzar’s Daughter, begins in the vividly realized backstreets of Balat.

In her second, A Chemical Prison, a corpse is discovered locked in an attic on Ishak Paşa Caddesi, just down from the gate of the Topkapi Palace.

The 4th, Deep Waters, begins with a murder victim being dumped on waterfront Reşadiye Caddesi beside the Galata Bridge.

The 5th, Harem, ends with a shoot-out at the Malta Köşkü in Yıldız Park.

A frequent visitor to İstanbul, Nadel travels armed with a digital camera in order to capture the urban landscapes through which her characters move.

It could all be a bit pedantic and trainspotterish, but in fact it is handled so skilfully that, taken together, the descriptions and detailing all add up to one great passionate homage to the city.

“It’s the place that I love and I want other people to love it as well.”, says Nadel.

Not that she is afraid of showing the spots and blemishes.

Her books also deal with AIDS, prostitution,, rent boys, family blood feuds and drug use.

Not to mention some graphic kinky sex, including in Belshazzar’s Daughter a woman who gets off on fellating guns (based, claims Nadel, who is a fomer psychiatric hospital worker, on someone she once met – but socially, not professionally).

Local press in İstanbul has been good and sales remain respectable.

İkmen may not be the perfect Turk but native İstanbulus seem to have taken their fictional compatriot to their hearts, with flaws and all.

Born in the East End of London, Barbara Nadel trained as an actress before becoming a writer.

Now writing full-time, she has previously worked as a public relations officer for the National Schizophrenia Fellowship’s Good Companion Service and as a mental health advocate for the mentally disordered in a psychiatric hospital.

She has also worked with sexually abused teenagers and taught psychology in schools and colleges, and was the patron of the Acorn Group in Shrewsbury, a charity (now apparently closed following a cut in funding) caring for those in emotional and mental distress.

She has been a regular visitor to Turkey for more than 25 years.

She has written 25 Çetin İkmen novels to date so far.

Under the motto: “We have to get to know each other better, it makes us understand one another better, trust each other more, and live together more peacefully“, promoting “tolerance, international understanding and the great concept of different nations and cultures living in peace and harmony“, I want my descriptions of neighbourhoods, landmarks and locations to be as precise and exact as those of a travel writer, with the descriptions and detailing all add up to one great passionate homage to the city.

I want to describe places in a vivid manner like Edmondo de Amicis, Hans Christian Andersen, Giacomo Casanova, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harrison Griswold Dwight, Gustave Flaubert, Theophile Gauthier, Andre Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Aaron Hill, Pierre Loti, Herman Melville, Will Seymour Monroe, Gerard de Nerval, Arthur Symons and Mark Twain.

I need to read like a writer.

I need to experience Life as a writer.

It won’t be easy.

A man cannot serve two masters at the same time.

My muse or my wife.

Tough call.

For the benefit of Mr. Kite,
There will be a show tonight
On trampoline.

The Hendersons will all be there.
Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair.
What a scene!

Over men and horses, hoops and garters,
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
In this way
Mr. K.
Will challenge the world!

The celebrated Mr. K.
Performs his feat on Saturday
At Bishopsgate.

The Hendersons will dance and sing
As Mr. Kite flies through the ring.
Don’t be late!

Messrs. K. and H. assure the public
Their production will be second to none.
And of course
Henry the horse
Dances the waltz!

The band begins at ten to six,
When Mr. K. performs his tricks
Without a sound.

And Mr. H. will demonstrate
Ten summersets he’ll undertake
On solid ground.

Having been some days in preparation,
A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
And tonight
Mr. Kite
Is topping the bill!

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Photos

• Time Out Istanbul

• An Istanbul Anthology: Travel Writing through the Centuries, edited by Kaya Genç

• Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Pendik possibilities

Above: Images of Pendil, Istanbul, Türkiye

Beyoğlu, İstanbul, Türkiye

Sunday 7 April 2024

“Yesterday I spoke to playwright and humourist Karlweis about keeping a diary.

He said it was good to get into the habit of reckoning up with yourself, but that one never confronts oneself with the whole truth, there is always an element of coquetry about it.

Sadly, I must admit that he is right.

In these pages I have often lied and glossed over many of my faults.

Forgive me, I’m only human.“

(7 April 1899: Alma Mahler – Werfel)

Above: Austrian composer, author, editor and socialite Alma Mahler – Werfel (1879 – 1964)

Istanbul has never lacked style.

From as far back as the purple robes of the Byzantines, the hallucinatory pattern makers of the Ottomans and that gorgeous sickle moon and star red flag, this city has known how to cut a dash.

Over the past two millennia Istanbul has retained a vibrancy and flair that, despite the odd ups and downs of politics and the economy, has never been anything less than vital.

Istanbul’s strategic location has attraction has attracted many a marauding army over the centuries.

The Greeks, Persians, Romans and Venetians took turns ruling before the Ottomans stormed into town and decided to stay.

Physical reminders of their various tenure are found littered across the city and the fact that Istanbul straddles two continents wasn’t its only drawcard.

This was the final stage on the legendary Silk Routes that linked Asia and Europe.

Many of the merchants who came here liked it so much that they too decided to stay.

In so doing, they endowed the city with a cultural diversity that it retains to this day.

Above: Aerial view of the historical peninsula and modern skyline of Istanbul

Some ancient cities are the sum of their monuments, but Istanbul factors a lot more into the equation.

Chief among its manifold attratctions are the locals, who have an infectious love of life and generosity of spirit.

This vibrant, inclusive and expanding community is full of people who work and party hard, treasure family and friendships, and have no problem melding tradition and modernity in their everyday lives.

Joining them in their favourite haunts – çay bahcesis (tea gardens), neighbourhood coffeehouses, meyhanes (Turkish taverns and kebapçis (kebap restaurants) – is a highlight of any visit.

Above: Aya Sophia Mosque in Istanbul

“Why do I love this city?

Let me count the ways.

I love the locals who have an endless supply of hospitality, good humour and insightful conversation at their disposal.

I love the fact that when I walk down a city street, layers of history unfold before me.

I love listening to the sound of the müezzins dueling from their minarets and I love seeing the sun set over the world’s most beautiful skyline.

I love the restaurants, the bars and the tea gardens, but most of all I love the fact that in Istanbul an extraordinary cultural experience lies around every corner.”

(Virginia Maxwell, Lonely Planet Istanbul)

Istanbul has long been a city in transformation.

Its name changed from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul.

Its rulers included Byzantine Emperors, Ottoman Sultans and Republican officials.

It hosted the senior Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church, the spiritual leader of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christians and the seat of the Islamic Caliphate.

So is Istanbul an Islamic city?

A Byzantine beacon?

A modern metropolis?

All of the above.

In the course of all these changes the city has managed to preserve its magnificent scenery, history and culture.

It has become an open museum of different civilizations.

Above: Maiden’s Tower, Istanbul

Travellers from Europe (such as my German wife) and North America (such as your humble Canadian blogger) have come to Istanbul to observe this curious living legacy, projecting our dreams of a society free from the constraints of the Western world.

During two centuries of touristic activity, Istanbul has become not only an object of observation, but as well a source of inspiration for the observer.

The observations of the rituals, the monuments as well as the mundane life of a city struggling to preserve its personality in the constant ruthless flux of change continues to be captured by writers, diplomats and tourists.

Many travellers have approached Istanbul from the sea and have witnessed the beauty of Byzantium as it appears to them, dreamlike between the fogs of fantasy and the rigours of reality.

We did not.

Above: Ortaköy Mosque, Istanbul

As Istanbul is the nation’s capital in everything but name, getting here is easy.

There are two international airports (Istanbul International and Sabiha Gökçen International Airport:

The former is a sophisticated cosmopolitan fatherly airport and the latter is his pragmatic budget daughter) and two otogars (bus stations) from which international travellers arrive and depart.

My wife flew to the father and will depart from the daughter.

Above: View of Levent financial district from Istanbul Sapphire Tower

There are two international sleeper train services to / from Istanbul:

• the Istanbul – Sofya Express to Bulgaria

Above: Sofia, Bulgaria

• the Bosfor Ekspresi to Bucharest (Romania)

Above: Bucharest, Romania

Travellers wanting to make their way to Iran can take the high speed train to Ankara and then connect with the weekly Trans-Asya service to Tabriz and Tehran.

The trip from Ankara takes 2 1/2 days.

Above: Flag of Iran

As a resident expat teaching in Eskişehir, I boarded the 0640 train – one of the eight daily fast trains that operate between Ankara and Istanbul.

Above: Eskişehir railway station

Though the most convenient place to disembark the train is at Söğütlüçeşme Station in Kadiköy District, usually I disembark at Pendik Station to then grab a cab to Sabiha Gökçen Airport.

Normally I fly out from there but today I would meet the wife arriving there (finally) at 1630.

Above: Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, Istanbul

The Turkish State Railways own and maintain all public railways in Turkey.

This includes railway stations, ports, bridges and tunnels, yards and maintenance facilities.

In 2016, TCDD controlled an active network of 12,532 km (7,787 mi) of railways, making it the 22nd largest railway system in the world. 

The Turkish State Railways operate passenger services on 90% of their system.

These are intercity, regional, commuter and international services.

In the railways’ first year, 52% of passenger travel in Turkey was by rail, despite the system lacking connections to many parts of the country.

Rail transport was the main mode of transport for passengers in the following two decades, reaching an all-time high of 57% of passenger transport in 1947, but then started to decline after 1950, due to the mass construction of roads.

Above: Turkish State Railways logo

Today, the passenger ratio is slowly increasing with the opening of high-speed rail lines in Turkey.

High-speed rail in Türkiye began service in 2009.

TCDD has branded its high-speed service as Yüksek Hızlı Tren (YHT)(“high speed train“), after the trains’ capacity to reach 250 km/h (and in some advanced sections of the Ankara-Konya railroad up to 300 km/h).

There had been previously tried but failed accelerated train projects, i.e. higher speed rail without the necessary upgrades on the railroad tracks, causing a number of accidents and ending up with losses incurred by TCDD in early 2000s.

YHT, in stark contrast, became a commercially successful, safe and cheap alternative to flights and roads, cutting the travel time between the city centers of two largest cities of the country up to 4 hours.

Currently, YHT trains operate 22 daily trips based from its central hub in Ankara, in addition to more trips on the Istanbul–Konya high-speed railway that bypass Ankara.

YHT currently operates on two main lines:

• the Ankara – Istanbul high speed railway 
• the Ankara – Konya high speed railway

In total, these lines connect eight provincial capitals out of 81 provinces in Türkiye, namely Adapazarı (via Arifli), Ankara, Bilecik, Eskişehir, Istanbul, İzmit, Karaman and Konya.

There are currently ongoing construction projects aiming to link up at least six more provincial capitals, including the 3rd and 4th largest cities of the country İzmir and Bursa, as well as Afyonkarahisar, Edirne, Kayseri, Sivas and other potential cities.

Further ambitions at the planning stage eventually aim to link up east and west points of the country through high-speed railways and act as an international high-speed railway bridge across Europe and Asia.

Pendik Station (Pendik garı) is the main railway station in the Pendik District of Istanbul, located between Hatboyu and Abdülhalik Renda Avenues in southeastern Pendik.

The TCDD operates YHT trains to Ankara and Konya, via Eskişehir, along with daily regional trains to Adapazarı.

The station is 24.05 km (14.94 mi) away from Haydarpaşa Station in central Istanbul.

Above: Pendik station building

(Haydarpaşa Station (Haydarpaşa Garı) is a railway station in Istanbul, that was, until 2012 the main city terminal for trains travelling to and from the Anatolian side of Turkey.

It used to be Turkey’s busiest railway station.

(Its counterpart on the European side of the city was Sirkeci Station which served train services to and from the Thracian side of the country.)

Since a fire in 2010 the station has not been in use and its future remains uncertain.)

Above: Haydarpaşa Station, Istanbul

The Metro line M10 makes the link between Pendik and Sabiha Gökçen Airport, nine kilometres north.

As a taxi is far simpler than struggling with vending machines I tend to take a taxi to the airport from the station.

Above: Istanbul Metro logo

Arriving at Pendik Station at 0912, more than six hours before my wife’s ETA, I decided to linger in Pendik until noon and then I grabbed a cab to the Airport.

Pendik is a municipality and district of Istanbul Province. 

Its area is 190 km².

Its population is 750,435 (2022). 

It is the 4th largest district of Istanbul and the largest district of the Anatolian Side.

It is on the Asian side between Kartal and Tuzla, on the Marmara Sea.

The area has a Formula One racetrack.

There is a high-speed boat across the Marmara Sea to Yalova for people travelling out of the city to Bursa and the Aegean.

Although Macedonians are known as the oldest settlement in Pendik, human remains dating back 4,000 years were found during excavations.

In the district, between Kaynarca and Pendik, 50 meters away from the coast, an old settlement dating from the Neolithic period, thought to have been founded in 6500 BC, was found with 32 graves and house foundation ruins. 

During the Roman, Byzantine and Latin Empire periods, the coastal town was known as Pantichium.

Although it remained with the Seljuks in 1080 – 1083 after Roman and Eastern Roman domination, it fell into the hands of the Latin Empire again.

In 1306, it came under Ottoman rule, but this led to Byzantine efforts to regain it.

These efforts were unsuccessful with the Battle of Pelekanon in 1330.

Pendik, which remained empty until Abdurrahman Gazi took it over during the reign of Yıldırım Bayezid in 1400, has been a settlement completely under Turkish rule since then.

Pendik, which was a small fishing town under Ottoman rule, was completely destroyed by a big fire.

According to sources, after the 50-hour fire that destroyed 1,200 houses and shops, Azaryan Efendi, the Chairman of the Notary Assembly, Senate and Foreign Affairs Committee, brought engineers and architects from Paris and had the plans of the new settlement drawn.

He also put his signature on the plans by having the first letter of his name placed in the city center.

Today, the lines formed by Gazipaşa-İsmetpaşa and Orhan Maltepe Streets are still the busiest center of the district.

Over the centuries, Bosniaks have migrated to Turkey, with a large number arriving after the Austro-Hungarian campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878.

Many settled in the Pendik boroughs of Sapanbağları, Yeşilbağlar and Bahçelievler.

Apart from naming their streets and shops after their village in Bosnia, these people have blended into the Istanbul working-class lifestyle of the rest of Pendik.

After the 1924 Turkey – Greece Population Exchange, the Muslim Turkish population from Drama and Ioannina settled in Pendik.

The Greeks who went from Pendik also founded a settlement called Pendik near Thessaloniki.

The core of the new Pendik was formed with the participation of Drama residents, Yanya residents and, in the 1950s, Erzincan residents. 

Bosnians who emigrated from Yugoslavia after 1960 were also added to this structure .

This immigrant population settled in Pendik’s Sapanbağları and Yeşilbağlar neighborhoods between 1960 and 1970.

Until the 1970s Pendik was a rural area, far from the city.

The opening of the Pendik Shipyard on 1 July1982 in Pendik, which generally developed as a summer settlement until the Eighties, played a major role in which Pendik received the most immigration.

Due to the opening of the shipyard and the great development of industrial establishments and increasing migration, Pendik ceased to be a summer settlement.

Apartment buildings began to replace houses with gardens. 

In 1990, 3,150 houses were built in Pendik – Kurtköy for those forced to migrate from various cities of Bulgaria. 

In the late 1990s two private educational institutions were built inland from Pendik:

• Koç Özel Lisesi

Above: Koç School logo

• Sabancı University

Road construction and industrial development in the Pendik/Tuzla/Gebze region has been ongoing since the 1990s.

Pendik receives immigration day by day.

The majority of the District consists of citizens originating from Sivas, Erzurum, Ordu, Tokat, Kastamonu, Trabzon, Erzincan, Sakarya and Giresun provinces as well as citizens of Bosnian and Balkan immigrant origin.

Above: Pendik shore

Today Pendik is a crowded mix of working class housing (especially further towards the E5 motorway) with more expensive apartments with sea views along the coast.

There is a busy shopping district (with a large street market on Saturdays), restaurants and movie theaters.

Pendik is far from downtown Istanbul.

Above: Pendik

It is served by Marmaray suburban trains.

The coastal road is fast but does not carry public transport, except for Bus 16A which only runs until 8 pm and the Kadikoy-Bostanci-Pendik dolmus.

Above: Pendik

There is a certain undefinable quality about Pendik that I like.

Perhaps Pendik represents a sense of novelty, for it is from here where I usually embark on new adventures.

Thanks to previous visits, I am known on sight at both the teahouse and the Kent Park kebab restaurant close to the Station.

I have on occasion, time permitting, wandered down the pedestrian street, soaking in the hustle and bustle of shoppers.

Above: Pedestrian zone, Pendik

I marvel at the beauty of the centrally located mosque and sometimes have coffee at Daniel’s Coffee.

Today, having a quarter of the day to spare, I found a restaurant, the Cooking House, serving breakfast, and soon I am feasting on a mixed omelette, orange juice, Turkish coffee (with sugar) and black tea.

As I eat, I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four yet again, but this time I try to see this masterpiece from a writer’s point of view, using tips I have garnered from Francine Prose’s (Is that really her name?) Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.

As I read, I think about what I have read and how Orwell struck his thoughts and plot together.

There remains so much about Nineteen Eighty-Four with which I can personally relate.

His writing is vivid right from the start.

Above: English writer Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) (1903 – 1950)

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Light exposes the cold.

Thirteen is an unlucky number in the West as Christ’s 13th disciple Judas Iscariot would betray Him.

Above: The Kiss of Judas, Giotto di Bondone (1304)

Thirteen hundred hours is a militaristic way of telling time.

I can see and feel in my mind the vile wind, the gritty dust, the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.

The world looks cold, the sky a harsh blue but beneath a world that has no colour in anything.

A place to be experienced with a sort of vague distaste, a rotting vista, patched-up windows, sagging walls and plaster dust, a place unpossessed by either background or intelligibility.

And yet its denizens are damned to set their features into expressions of quiet optimism.

Above: Winston Smith (John Hurt), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Pendik is not the London of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The breeze is gentle, the streets clean, only the aroma of coffee and omelette assault my senses.

The world is warm, the heavens beaconing, the future bright and kaleidoscopic

A moment to be savoured, delicious and fresh, a vista of promise, cats clamber walls, aplace unposing unaffected by either past or potentiality.

The moment is.

It is glorious.

Above: Pendik

As a public persona in the role of an educator I must be acutely aware of how my reactions can reverberate against me.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what every one else was doing, an instinctive reaction, silently, invisibly keeping alive belief, hope.

Like Winston Smith, I am also well aware that whether I refrain from writing this electronic diary, makes no difference.

Whether I continue with this diary or whether I don’t go on with this makes no difference.

To write a diary is to be frozen by the mutability of the past.

To feel as though you are wandering, alone.

The past is dead, the future unimaginable.

What certainty do I have that one single human being now living is on my side?

Nothing is truly your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

For whom is this diary being written?

For the future, for the past – for an age that might merely be illusionary.

In front of me there lies only death.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Out of existence and out of memory.

How can you appeal to the future when not a trace of you could physically survive?

Perhaps I am a lonesome ghost uttering thoughts no one reads.

But as long as I speak, the continuity is unbroken.

It is not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that we carry on the human heritage.

It is extraordinarily difficult.

When there are no external recorns that you can refer to, even the outline of your own life loses its sharpness.

If all records tell the same tale – then the lie passes into history and becomes truth.

“Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past.”, ran the Party slogan.

And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered.

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

It was quite simple.

All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.

Reality control.

Doublethink.

Above: Winston Smith (John Hurt), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

I consider my own past.

So much unrecorded.

What I remember is “truth” even if I cannot prove it to be true.

What I write is “true” whether anyone believes it to be plausible or not.

In retelling my life for public purview I slide away into the labyrithine world of doublethink.

To know and not to know.

To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.

To hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.

To use logic against logic.

To repudiate morality while laying claim to it.

To forget whatever it is necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it is needed and then promptly to forget it again.

To apply the same process to the process itself.

I invent myself.

Some of my lies are true.

Above: Canada Slim once upon a time

The past has not merely been altered.

It has been actually destroyed.

For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there exists no true record outside your own memory?

A memory that is itself alterable and inaccurate?

He: We met at nine. 
She: We met at eight. 
He: I was on time. 
She: No, you were late.
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well.

He: We dined with friends. 
She: We dined alone. 
He: A tenor sang. 
She: A baritone.
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well.

He: That dazzling April moon. 
She: There was none that night.
She: And the month was June. 
He: That's right. That's right.
He: It warms my heart to know that you 
He: Remember still the way you do
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well.

He: How often I've thought of that Friday. 
She: Monday night
He: When we had our last rendezvous
He: Somehow I foolishly wondered if you 
He: Might by some chance be thinking of it too?

He: That carriage ride 
She: You walked me home
He: You lost a glove
She: It was a comb
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well

He: That brilliant sky 
She: We had some rain
He: Those Russian songs 
She: From sunny Spain
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well

He: You wore a gown of gold 
She: I was all in blue
He: Am I getting old? 
She: Oh, no, not you

She: How strong you were 
She: How young and gay
She: A prince of love in every way
He: Ah, yes, I remember it well.

Hermione Gingold (She) and Maurice Chevalier (He), Gigi (1958)

Above: Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier, Gigi (1958)

My readers can never really know how much of this legend is true and how much has been invented, for even I myself remain unclear of how much is true and how much I have chosen to be believe is true.

Everything melts into mist, just as this morning’s meal will eventually vanish from my memory.

Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?
Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?

I woke up in a Soho doorway
A policeman knew my name
He said, “You can go sleep at home tonight
If you can get up and walk away”
I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew back my hair
I remember throwin’ punches around
And preachin’ from my chair

Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

I took the tube back out of town
Back to the Rollin’ Pin
I felt a little like a dying clown
With a streak of Rin Tin Tin
I stretched back and I hiccupped
And looked back on my busy day
Eleven hours in the tin pan
God, there’s got to be another way

Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

“Who are you?“, The Who, 1978

As I write these words in the quiet restaurant, my face remains completely inscrutable.

As I write these words, I feel joy.

For much of the greatest pleasures in my life are manifest in this moment: a good meal, writing my thoughts and turning them into entertainment and education for those brave enough to continue to read my words until their conclusion, in this ADD world I never made.

I ask questions of myself.

I try to answer them promptly.

I laugh at myself, invisibly and inaudibly.

Don’t think sorry’s easily said
Don’t try turning tables instead
You’ve taken lots of chances before
But I ain’t gonna give anymore
Don’t ask me
That’s how it goes
‘Cause part of me knows what you’re thinking

Don’t say words you’re gonna regret
Don’t let the fire rush to your head
I’ve heard the accusation before
And I ain’t gonna take any more
Believe me
The sun in your eyes
Made some of the lies worth believing

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
And I don’t need to see any more to know that
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind

Don’t leave false illusions behind
Don’t cry cause I ain’t changing my mind
So find another fool like before
Cause I ain’t gonna live anymore believing
Some of the lies while all of the signs are deceiving

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
And I don’t need to see any more to know that
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
And I don’t need to see any more to know that
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind

“Eye in the Sky“, Alan Parsons Project, 1982

I down the details of my delight, pay for breakfast, and roll my bags back to the station.

Grab a cab.

To the Airport.

Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport (SAW) is one of the two international airports serving Istanbul, the largest city in Türkiye.

Located 32 km (20 mi) southeast of the city center, Sabiha Gökçen Airport is in the Asian part of the bi-continental city and serves as the hub for AJet and Pegasus Airlines.

The facility is named after Sabiha Gökçen (1913 – 2001), adoptive daughter of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 – 1938).

She was the first female fighter pilot in the world. 

Above: Sabiha Gökçen, first Turkish female aviator

Although Istanbul Airport, located 63 km (39 mi) west of the European side of Istanbul, is larger, Sabiha Gökçen is still one of the largest airports in the country.

Above: Istanbul International Airport logo

The airport was built because Atatürk Airport (located on the European side) was not large enough to meet the booming passenger demands (both domestic and international).

The airport opened on 8 January 2001.

In mid-2008, ground was broken to upgrade the international terminal to handle 25 million passengers annually.

The new terminal was inaugurated on 31 October 2009.

SAW’s international terminal capacity originally was 3 million passengers per year and the domestic terminal capacity was 0.5 million passengers per year.

In 2010, Sabiha Gökçen airport handled 11,129,472 passengers.

The airport had planned (in 2011) to host 25 million passengers by 2023, but had already received and handled more than 35 million passengers by 2019.

In September 2010, the airport was voted the World’s Best Airport at the World Low Cost Airlines Congress in London.

A second runway was inaugurated on 25 December 2023. 

The addition of this runway will increase the hourly capacity from 40 to 80 aircraft movements, making the airport hope for double the capacity. It is also planned to build new passenger terminals between the two runways.

The new terminal building with a 25 million annual passenger capacity conducts domestic and international flights under one roof.

The features and services of the new terminal and its outlying buildings include a four-storey car park with a capacity of about 4,718 vehicles + 72 bus (3.836 indoors and 882 + 72 bus outdoors), a four-storey hotel with 128 rooms, adjacent to the terminal and with separate entrances at air and ground sides, 112 check-in, 24 online check-in counters as well as a VIP building & apron viewing CIP halls with business lounges.

There is also a Multi Aircraft Ramp System (MARS), allowing simultaneous service to 8 aircraft with large fuselages (IATA code E) or 16 middle-sized fuselage aircraft (IATA code C) installed.

The terminal additionally features a 400 m² (4,300 sq ft) conference center, 5,000 m² (54,000 sq ft) food court, for cafés and restaurants and a duty free shopping area, with a ground of 4,500 square-meters.

At the international departures area, on the airside, an hourly hotel and lounge became operational in January 2020 as well. 

The airport’s cargo terminal has a capacity of 90,000 tons per year and is equipped with 18 cold storage depots.

Above: Sabiha Gökçen Airport terminal building

On 23 December 2015, at approximately 2:00 AM, explosions were reported to have occurred in a parked Pegasus Airlines aircraft, killing one cleaner and wounding another inside the plane.

Five nearby planes were reported to be damaged as well.

The operations were reported to continue normally soon after, however with heightened security measures in place. 

Three days later, it was reported that militant group Kurdistan Freedom Falcons had allegedly organized the attack.

On 7 January 2020, a plane operated as Pegasus Airlines flight 747, a Boeing 737-800, suffered a runway excursion after landing.

Passengers evacuated the aircraft using slides.

No fatalities or injuries occurred.

On 5 February 2020, a Boeing 737-800, Pegasus Airlines Flight 2193, skidded off the end of Runway 6, leading to an airport shutdown. 

There were 177 passengers and 6 crew on board.

Three people were killed, another 179 were injured.

It is always a mistake to read about an airport before the arrival or departure of a plane.

Ignorance is bliss.

Knowledge cripples us, trips us up, with the possibility that what was could once again be.

George: Do you know the three most exciting sounds in the world?

Billy: Sure, “Breakfast is served, “Lunch is served, “Dinner is served.”

George: No. Anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.

(It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946)

Above: George Bailey (James Stewart) and Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Harbours, airports, train stations and bus terminals:

Why are they simultaneously wonderful and horrible?

What excitement!

The boat will sail, the flight will fly, the train and bus will leave from their respective platforms.

Regulated, regimented, restricted.

How depressing that we are viewed as sheep needing shepherds.

Ports, airports and stations are as happy as hospitals.

The old life everpresent amidst the threat and promise of something new.

This airport, most airports, do not encourage you to linger longer than necessary.

Departures are impatience.

Arrivals demand patience.

Above: Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca (1942)

I arrived at noon via the departure level.

Apparently, no one takes a taxi to arrive at an airport.

I grab a salad and coffee at Starbucks on the arrivals level and wait.

Above: Starbucks logo

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.

General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that.

It seems to me that love is everywhere.

Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love.

If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”

(Love Actually, 2003)

I begin to plan our week in Istanbul though I fully know that my wife has made plans of her own.

For she is a woman and she is German.

The need to control the future is paramount even if it is illusionary.

Men are stupid and women are crazy.

“Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, Northerner and Westerner screams with same admiration.

The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on Earth.”

(Edmondo De Amicis, Constantinople)

“If the Earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital.

Whoever possesses Constantinople ought to rule the world.”

(Napoleon Bonaparte)

Above: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

Dear God in Heaven, how in Hell can I possibly capture the essence of beauty in merely a week or for that matter in a lifetime?

Trying to grasp the immensity, the totality of Istanbul is akin to a man seeking to understand a woman.

Above: Galata Tower, Istanbul

Soon my wife’s flight will arrive.

Soon we will be herded into an airport shuttle and thrust into the heart of the capital of the world.

As I write these words my face remains completely inscrutable.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what every one else was doing, an instinctive reaction, silently, invisibly keeping alive belief, hope.

“Remember, Red:

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

“I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head.

I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

I hope!”

(Shawshank Redemption, 1994)

I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head.

I think it is the excitement only a man still in love with his wife can feel, a man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope her flight arrives without incident.

I hope to see my wife and hold her hand.

I hope the reality of the moment is as magical as it has been in my dreams.

I hope!

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Pictures

• Lonely Planet Istanbul

• The Assassin’s Cloak, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor

• Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

• Gigi (1958)

• “Who are you?“, The Who (1978)

• “Eye in the Sky“, Alan Parsons Project (1982)

• Love Actually (2003)

• Shawshank Redemption (1994)

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Eskişehir, Türkiye

Saturday 6 April 2024

“I am very happy these spring days.

Each morning I wake between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., then make tea, read for a while, work until 7:30, when I go for a walk.

Through the window I watch the day begin, from first grey light to full sunrise, as, in the evening, I watch it end.

It is a great joy to see each day’s first and last light.

After breakfast I read the papers, then work until lunch time.

After lunch, I lie down with a book and usually sleep for an hour or so, then walk or do gardening, mostly mowing the grass, followed by a late tea, work until about 7:30, another short stroll, supper, a game of cards with Kitty, and bed.

This quiet and serenity set one apart from public affairs.

The newspapers, which I still avidly devour, seem to be about another world than mine.

I continue to want to know about it, but not to visit it.

Above: Sazova Park, Eskişehir

A paperback series of religious books has, for its first volume, St. Augustine’s “Confessions”, and for its second “Sex, Love and Marriage”.

In contemporary terms, anything about fornication is religious, as anything about raising the standard of life, and ameliorating in material circumstances, is Christian.

Above: Berber theologican / philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430)

In this sense fornication can be seen as sacred, an act of Holy Communion – which, as Euclid says, is absurd.“

Above: Greek mathematician Euclid (4th century BC)

(6 April 1961, Malcolm Muggeridge)

Above: English journalist / satirist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990)

There are said to be three topics one should never discuss in public:

Politics, religion and sex.

Much to my surprise, I find myself compelled to speak of all three today, but perhaps not in such a way that my remarks will be considered blasphemous, libellous, profane or slanderous.

What has prompted this post is finding a reference by Wikipedia that today, 6 April, is “International Asexuality Day” and Muggeridge’s diary entry in the compendium of diaries that I collect.

As well, everyone at my place of work was encouraged to view video information about HPV awareness, prevention and vaccination, and I was asked why I felt that my attendance was not required.

Let me explain:

Human papillomavirus infection (HPV infection) is caused by a DNA virus.

Many HPV infections cause no symptoms and 90% resolve spontaneously within two years.

In some cases, an HPV infection persists and results in either warts or precancerous lesions.

These lesions, depending on the site affected, increase the risk of cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, mouth, tonsils or throat.

Nearly all cervical cancer is due to HPV.

Two strains – HPV16 and HPV18 – account for 70% of all cases.

HPV16 is responsible for almost 90% of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers.

Between 60% and 90% of the other cancers listed above are also linked to HPV. 

HPV6 and HPV11 are common causes of genital warts and laryngeal papillomatosis.

An individual can become infected with more than one type of HPV. 

The disease is only known to affect humans.

More than 40 types may be spread through sexual contact.

HPV vaccines can prevent the most common types of infection.

Nearly every sexually active individual is infected by HPV at some point in their lives. 

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STİ) globally.

My solution?

Abstain from sex.

But is that desirable or even possible?

I will return to this question below.

 

Above: Human papilloma virus (HPV)

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990) was an English journalist and satirist.

His father, H.T. Muggeridge (1864 – 1942), was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romford, in Essex).

Malcolm’s brother Eric was one of the founders of Plan International.

Above: Malcolm Muggeridge

(Plan International is a development and humanitarian organisation which works in over 75 countries across Africa, the Americas and Asia to advance children’s rights and equality for girls. 

Its focus is on child protection, education, child participation, economic security, emergencies, health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and water and sanitation.

As of 2021, Plan International reached 26.2 million girls and 24.1 million boys through its programmes.

Plan International provides training in disaster preparedness, response and recovery, and has worked on relief efforts in countries including Haiti, Colombia and Japan.

Plan International was founded in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) by British journalist John Langdon – Davies (1897 – 1971) and aid worker Eric Muggeridge.

The organization was founded with the aim to provide food, accommodation and education to children whose lives had been disrupted by the Spanish Civil War.)

In his 20s, Muggeridge was attracted to Communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The experience turned him into an anti-Communist.

Above: Hammer and sickle symbol of Communism

(Communism (from Latin communis, ‘common, universal’) is a left wing to far left sociopolitical, philosophical and economic ideology within the Socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a Communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. 

Problem 1:

How much is needed and who makes that determination?

A Communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.

Above: Metro Station, Plošča Lienina, Minsk

Problem 2:

Why were we born individuals if not to want something for ourselves individually?

As much as I perceive the discrimination and inequality inherent in the classification of society, I think true equality between all people can only work if everyone is by their innate nature truly equal.

Or as George Orwell so aptly put it:

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other.”

Above: The Hoof and Horn flag described in the book Animal Farm is a parody of the hammer and sickle.

I think there is an inevitable division between people because of aptitude, circumstance and character.

My cousin, for example, is, by his very nature, a superior athlete compared to me.

If all else were equal between us, his natural aptitude for racing like the wind will in all probability mean that I will lag behind him in a footrace.

This does not infer that he is necessarily more deserving of happiness than I, but rather I need to attain my success in ways other than athleticism.

Above: Canadian athlete / humanitarian Steve O’Brien

The environment from whence you came also determines, to a certain degree, how “successful” your future may become.

Those born with advantages that others lack may have an easier time achieving their goals.

These advantages can be biological, economic, geographical or psychological.

I am not suggesting that having advantages that others lack is necessarily fair.

Above: English scientist Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) –  His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science.

I believe society should contınue to strive to ensure that all its members have equal rights and dignity as defined by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, but beyond these definitions I also feel that those who are gifted with talent and ambition should be held worthy of respect for their individuality.

Money’s elimination seems improbable to me, for money establishes a common standard by which we judge value.

I have a cow.

You have a sheep.

We want to make a trade, but the difference in size between the animals suggests that the exchange may be perceived as unequal.

In Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), William Stanley Jevons famously analyzed money in terms of four functions:

• a medium of exchange
• a common measure of value 
• a standard of value 
• a store of value

By 1919, Jevons’s four functions of money were summarized in the couplet:

“Money’s a matter of functions four,

A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store.”

As much as I dislike the discrimination and inequality that exists between those who possess wealth and those who do not, I think the problem is not so much the money itself but rather human nature.

Above: English economist / logician William Stanley Jevons (1835 – 1882)

Problem 3:

Who keeps the society beneficial to all?

If standards are to be desired then they must be defined and maintained.

But the very need for definition and maintenance means that there needs to be individuals capable of making those decisions for others.

If I am equal to you, then can I truly respect you having power over me to make these decisions for me?

To accept authority over myself I first must acknowledge that you are in some way more capable than I am in making decisions that I am not as qualified to make.

A judgment of these qualifications should only be possible by those who possess those qualifications beforehand.

As much as the nature of a man leans towards freedom and individualism, there will be moments wherein I will require the aid of others to maintain myself.

If a mechanic is equal to a physician in aptitude and education then there would be no need of specialized professions.

I may possess basic human dignıty that suggests a doctor is equal to me in that regard, but a doctor possesses the skill, experience and qualifications when medical assistance is required.

I must acceed that the doctor is my superior in this manner.

I also must reward the doctor for the time and effort it took to develop the proficiency needed to repair my ailing form.

Who determines that doctor’s abilities to heal me?

There must be some authority that establishes criteria.

As people of common heritage have banded together into collectives, collectively there then needs be an institution that safeguards the well-being of that collective.

Thus the need for the state.

Above: Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Problem 4:

The state is, in theory, representative of the people that reside therein, but those who claim to represent me may not necessarily hold my interests more paramount than theirs.

The advantages of power and the wealth and status it often confers make power desirable.

The acquisition and maintenance of power often results in the needs of the many denied in favour of the desires of a few.

Those who represent a nation may more often than not be negligent of the best needs of that nation.

Therein lies the failure of Communism.

There can be no true equality when the need for law and order requires those superior to myself to set those standards.

A universal society may sound desirable in theory, but it is damnably difficult in its execution.

I digress.)

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1955 – 1991)

The middle of five brothers, Muggeridge was born in Sanderstead, Surrey.

Above: All Saints parish church, Addintgon Road, Sanderstead

His first name, Thomas, was chosen by his father in honour of his hero Thomas Carlyle.

Above: Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881)

Muggeridge grew up in Croydon, attended Selhurst High School there , and then Selwyn College in Cambridge for four years.

Above: Selwyn College

Still a student, he taught for brief periods in 1920, 1922 and 1924 at the John Ruskin Central School, Croydon, where his father was Chairman of the Governors.

After graduating in 1924 with a degree in natural sciences, Muggeridge went to India for three years to teach English literature at Union Christian College, Aluva, Cochin.

Above: UC College, Aluva, Kerala

His writing career began during his time in Cochin via an exchange of correspondence on war and peace with Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948), with Muggeridge’s article on the interactions being published in Young India, a local magazine.

Above: Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948)

Returning to Britain in 1927, he married Katherine “Kitty” Dobbs (1903 – 1994).

He worked as a supply teacher before moving to teach English literature in Egypt six months later.

There he met Arthur Ransome (1884 – 1967), who was visiting Egypt as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian.

Ransome recommended Muggeridge to the newspaper’ editors, who offered him his first position in journalism.

Initially attracted by Communism, Muggeridge and his wife travelled to Moscow in 1932.

He was to be a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.

During Muggeridge’s early time in Moscow he was completing a novel, Picture Palace, loosely based on his experiences and observations at the Manchester Guardian.

It was completed and submitted to publishers in January 1933, but there was concern by the publishers over potential libel claims, and so the published book was not distributed.

Very few first-edition copies exist today.

That setback caused considerable financial difficulties for Muggeridge, who was not employed and was paid only for articles that were accepted.

Increasingly disillusioned by his close observation of Communism in practice, Muggeridge decided to investigate reports of the famine in Ukraine by travelling there and to the Caucasus without first obtaining the permission of the Soviet authorities.

The revealing reports that he sent back to the Manchester Guardian in the diplomatic bag, thus evading censorship, were not fully printed, and those that were published (on 25, 27 and 28 March 1933) were not published under Muggeridge’s name. 

Meanwhile, fellow journalist Gareth Jones (1905 – 1935), who had met Muggeridge in Moscow, published his own stories.

The two accounts helped to confirm the extent of a forced famine, which was politically motivated.

Above: Gareth Jones (1905 – 1935)

Writing in the New York Times, Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty denied the existence of any famine. 

Jones wrote letters to the Manchester Guardian in support of Muggeridge’s articles about the famine.

Above: Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933

Having come into conflict with British newspapers’ editorial policy of not provoking the authorities in the Soviet Union, Muggeridge returned to novel writing.

He wrote Winter in Moscow (1934), which describes conditions in the “socialist Utopia” and satirised Western journalists’ uncritical view of the Soviet regime.

He was later to call Duranty “the greatest liar I have met in journalism“.

Above: Walter Duranty (1884 – 1957)

Later, he began a writing partnership with Hugh Kingsmill.

Above: British writer / journalist Hugh Kingsmill (1889 – 1949)

Muggeridge’s politics changed from an independent socialist point of view to a conservative religious stance.

He wrote later:

“I wrote in a mood of anger, which I find rather absurd now: not so much because the anger was, in itself, unjustified, as because getting angry about human affairs is as ridiculous as losing one’s temper when an air flight is delayed.”

Above: Malcolm Muggeridge

After his time in Moscow, Muggeridge worked on other newspapers, including The Statesman in Calcutta, of which he was editor in 1934 to 1936.

In his second stint in India, he lived by himself in Calcutta, having left behind his wife and children in London.

Between 1930 and 1936, the Muggeridges had three sons and a daughter. 

His office was in the headquarters of the newspaper in Chowringhee.

When war was declared, Muggeridge went to Maidstone to join up but was sent away:

“My generation felt they’d missed the First War, now was the time to make up.” 

Above: Images of Maidstone, England

He was called into the Ministry of Information, which he called “a most appalling set-up“, and joined the army as a private.

Above: Senate House, the Ministry of Information headquarters in London during WW2

He joined the Corps of Military Police and was commissioned in May 1940.

He transferred to the Intelligence Corps as a lieutenant in June 1942.

Having spent two years as a Regimental Intelligence Officer in Britain, he was by 1942 in MI6.

Above: The SIS Building (or MI6 Building) at Vauxhall Cross, London, houses the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

He had been posted to Lourençco Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Mozambique, as a bogus vice-consul (called “a special correspondent” by London Controlling Section).

Above: Images of Maputo

Before heading out, Muggeridge stayed in Lisbon for some months, waiting for his visa to come through.

He stayed in Estoril at the Pensão Royal on 17 May 1942.

Above: Costa do Estoril, Portugal

His mission was to prevent information about Allied convoys off the coast of Africa falling into enemy hands. 

He wrote later that he also attempted suicide. 

After the Allied occupation of North Africa, he was posted to Algiers as liaison officer with the French sécurité militaire.

Above: Images of Algiers

In that capacity, he was sent to Paris at the time of the Liberation and worked alongside the Free French Forces of Charles de Gaulle.

He had a high regard for de Gaulle and considered him a greater man than Churchill (1874 – 1965).

Above: Charles de Gaulle (1890 – 1970)

He was warned to expect some anti-British feeling in Paris because of the attack on Mers el Kébir (on 3 July 1940, a British naval attack on neutral French Navy ships at the naval base at Mers el Kébir, near Oran, on the Algerian coast.

Above: Battleship Dunkerque under fire

In fact, Muggeridge, speaking on the BBC retrospective programme Muggeridge: Ancient & Modern, said that he had encountered no such feeling and indeed had been allowed on occasion to eat and drink for nothing at Maxim’s.

Above: Maxim’s Restaurant, Paris

He was assigned to make an initial investigation into P. G. Wodehouse’s five broadcasts from Berlin during the war.

Though he was prepared to dislike Wodehouse, the interview became the start of a lifelong friendship and publishing relationship as well as the subject for several plays.

(Wodehouse was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century.

His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves.

In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons.

In 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year.

After his release he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the War.

The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution.

Wodehouse never returned to England.)

Above: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)

Muggeridge also interviewed Coco Chanel in Paris about the nature of her involvement with the Nazis in Vichy (Nazi-occupied) France during the War.

(Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswoman.

The founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, she was credited in the post–WW1 era with popularizing a sporty, casual chic as the feminine standard of style.

This replaced the “corseted silhouette” that had earlier been dominant with a style that was simpler, far less time-consuming to put on and remove, more comfortable, and less expensive, all without sacrificing elegance.

She is the only fashion designer listed on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. 

Above: Coco Chanel (1883 – 1971)

A prolific fashion creator, Chanel extended her influence beyond couture clothing, realizing her aesthetic design in jewellery, handbags, and fragrance.

Her signature scent, Chanel No. 5, has become an iconic product.

Chanel herself designed her famed interlocked-CC monogram, which has been in use since the 1920s.

Her couture house closed in 1939, with the outbreak of WW2.

Chanel stayed in France and was criticized during the war for collaborating with the Nazi German occupiers and the Vichy puppet regime to free her nephew from a POW camp.

To secure his release Chanel began a liaison with a German diplomat/spy she had known before the war, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage (1896 – 1979).

Following her nephew’s release, she collaborated in minor ways.

After the war, Chanel was interrogated about her relationship with Dincklage, but she was not charged as a collaborator due to intervention by her friend — British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

When the War ended, Chanel moved to Switzerland, returning to Paris in 1954 to revive her fashion house.

In 2011, Hal Vaughan (1928 – 2013) published a biography about Chanel based on newly declassified documents, revealing that she had collaborated directly with the Nazi intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst.

One plan in late 1943 was for her to carry an SS peace overture to Churchill to end the War.

Vaughan establishes that Chanel committed herself to the German cause as early as 1941 and worked for General Walter Schellenberg (1910 – 1952), chief of the German intelligence agency Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service / SD) and the military intelligence spy network Abwehr (Counterintelligence) at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office / RSHA) in Berlin.

At the end of the War, Schellenberg was tried by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for war crimes.

He was released in 1951 owing to incurable liver disease and took refuge in Italy.

Chanel paid for Schellenberg’s medical care and living expenses, financially supported his wife and family and paid for Schellenberg’s funeral upon his death in 1952.

Above: SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg, Chief of SS intelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst

Suspicions of Coco Chanel’s involvement first began when German tanks entered Paris and began the Nazi occupation.

Chanel immediately sought refuge in the deluxe Hotel Ritz, which was also used as the headquarters of the German military.

It was at the Hotel Ritz where she fell in love with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, working in the German embassy close to the Gestapo.

When the Nazi occupation of France began, Chanel decided to close her store, claiming a patriotic motivation behind such decision.

However, when she moved into the same Hotel Ritz that was housing the German military, her motivations became clear to many.

While many women in France were punished for “horizontal collaboration” with German officers, Chanel faced no such action.

At the time of the French liberation in 1944, Chanel left a note in her store window explaining Chanel No. 5 to be free to all GIs. )

Above: Hotel Ritz, Paris

Muggeridge ended the War as a major.

Muggeridge wrote for the Evening Standard and also for the Daily Telegraph where he was appointed deputy editor in 1950.

He kept detailed diaries, which provide a vivid picture of the journalistic and political London of the day, including regular contact with George Orwell (1903 – 1950), Anthony Powell (1905 – 2000), Graham Greene (1904 – 1991) and Bill Deedes (1913 – 2007).

Muggeridge kept detailed diaries for much of his life, which were published in 1981 under the title Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Muggeridge comments perceptively on Ian Fleming (1908 – 1964), Guy Burgess (1911 – 1963) and Kim Philby (1912 – 1988).

When George Orwell died in 1950, Muggeridge and Anthony Powell organized Orwell’s funeral.

Muggeridge also acted as Washington correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

He was editor of Punch magazine from 1953 to 1957, a challenging appointment for one who claimed that:

“There is no occupation more wretched than trying to make the English laugh“.

In 1957, he received public and professional opprobrium for criticism of the British monarchy in the Saturday Evening Post.

The article was given the title “Does England Really Need a Queen?“.

Its publication was delayed by five months to coincide with the Royal State Visit to Washington DC taking place later that year.

It was little more than a rehash of views expressed in a 1955 article, Royal Soap Opera, but its timing caused outrage in the UK.

His notoriety then propelled him into becoming better known as a broadcaster, with regular appearances on the BBC’s Panorama, and a reputation as a tough interviewer.

Encounters with Brendan Behan (1923 – 1964) and Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) cemented his reputation as a fearless critic of modern life.

Above: Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge was described as having predatory behaviour towards women during his BBC years. 

He was described as a “compulsive groper“, reportedly being nicknamed “The Pouncer” and as “a man fully deserving of the acronym NSIT—not safe in taxis“.

His niece confirmed these reports, while also reflecting on the suffering inflicted on his family and saying that he changed his behaviour when he converted to Christianity in the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, Muggeridge became a vegetarian so that he would be “free to denounce those horrible factory farms where animals are raised for food“.

Above: Malcolm and Kit Muggeridge

He took to frequently denouncing the new sexual laxity of the Swinging Sixties on radio and television.

He particularly railed against “pills and pot“:

Birth control pills and cannabis.

In contrast, he met the Beatles before they were famous.

On 7 June 1961 he flew to Hamburg for an interview with Stern magazine and afterwards went out on the town and ended up at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn.

In his diary, he described their performance as “bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones“.

However, they recognised him from the television and they entered into conversation.

He acknowledged that “their faces were like Renaissance carvings of the saints or Blessed Virgins“.

Above: The Beatles, 1964

His book, Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes (1966), though acerbic in its wit, revealed a serious view of life.

The title is an allusion to the last line of the poem “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats:

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Above: William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

In 1967 and 1970, Muggeridge preached at Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge.

Above: Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge

Having been elected Rector of Edinburgh University, Muggeridge was goaded by the editor of The Student, Anna Coote, to support the call for contraceptive pills to be available at the University Health Centre.

He used a sermon at St. Giles’ Cathedral in January 1968 to resign the post to protest against the Students’ Representative Council’s views on “pot and pills“.

The sermon was published under the title “Another King“.

Muggeridge was known for his wit and profound writings often at odds with the opinions of the day.

“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream“, he liked to quote.

He wrote two volumes of an autobiography called Chronicles of Wasted Time (the title is a quotation from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 106“).

The first volume (1972) was The Green Stick.

The second volume (1973) was The Infernal Grove.

A projected third volume, The Right Eye, covering the postwar period, was never completed.

Agnostic for most of his life, Muggeridge became a Protestant Christian, publishing Jesus Rediscovered in 1969, a collection of essays, articles and sermons on faith, which became a best seller. 

Jesus: The Man Who Lives followed in 1976, which was a more substantial work describing the gospel in his own words.

In A Third Testament, he profiles six spiritual thinkers, whom he called “God’s spies“, who influenced his life: Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), William Blake (1757 – 1827), Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662), Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945) and Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855).

He also produced several BBC religious documentaries, including In the Footsteps of St. Paul.

(Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable.

Another definition provided is the view that:

“Human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist.“

The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895) coined the word agnostic in 1869, and said:

“It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.“)

Above: T. H. Huxley

Muggeridge became a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light in 1971 protesting against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence in Britain and advocating the teaching of Christ as the key to recovering moral stability in the nation.

He said at the time:

“The media today — press, television, and radio — are largely in the hands of those who favour the present Gadarene slide into decadence and Godlessness.”

(The Gadarene story shows Jesus exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, causing the swine to run down a hill into a lake and drown themselves.)

Above: Mosaic of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy (early 6th century)

In 1979, along with the Bishop of Southwark Mervyn Stockwood (1913 – 1995), Muggeridge appeared on the chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning to discuss the film Life of Brian with Monty Python members John Cleese and Michael Palin.

Although the Python members gave reasons that they believed the film to be neither anti-Christian nor mocking the person of Jesus, both Muggeridge and the Bishop insisted that they were being disingenuous and that the film was anti-Christian and blasphemous.

Muggeridge further declared their film to be “buffoonery“, “tenth-rate“, “this miserable little film” and “this little squalid number“.

Furthermore, Muggeridge stated that there was “nothing in this film that could possibly destroy anybody’s genuine faith“.

In saying this, the Pythons were quick to point out the futility of criticising it so vitriolically since Muggeridge did not think it was significant enough to affect anyone.

According to Palin, Muggeridge arrived late and so missing the two scenes in which Jesus and Brian were distinguished as different people.

The discussion was moderated by Tim Rice, the lyricist for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which had also generated some controversy in Britain about a decade earlier over its depiction of Jesus.

The comedians later expressed disappointment in Muggeridge, whom all in Monty Python had previously respected as a satirist.

Cleese said that his reputation had “plummeted” in his eyes.

Palin commented:

“He was just being Muggeridge, preferring to have a very strong contrary opinion as opposed to none at all.”

Above: “The Battle of Brian“

In 1982, at 79, Muggeridge was received into the Catholic Church after he had rejected Anglicanism, like his wife, Kitty.

This was largely under the influence of Mother Teresa (1910 – 1997) about whom he had written a book, Something Beautiful for God, setting out and interpreting her life.

His last book, Conversion (1988), describes his life as a 20th century pilgrimage, a spiritual journey.

Muggeridge died on 14 December 1990 in a nursing home in Hastings, England, at the age of 87.

He had suffered a stroke three years earlier.

How did a compulsive groper of women become a critic of the Swinging Sixties?

How did an agnostic become a defender of the faith?

How did a satirist become a stark opponent of satire?

I have not read Muggeridge’s works, though I do recall seeing video clips of “the Battle of Brian“, so I can only surmise how these transformations in Muggeridge’s character came about.

Let me turn to Australia’s best known family therapist and parenting author, Steve Biddulph, who expresses many of my thoughts on the topic.

What should be one of our greatest glories in Life is often one of the greatest disappointments.

Biddulph estimates that 60% of men under 40 are sex-addicted as opposed to sexual in a whole and balanced way.

When it comes to sex, many of us have been short-changed.

Human sexuality is potentially a huge energy source which pushes us towards union with a partner and release from the ordinary.

It is tragic that a facet of Life so important to Humanity has been exploited, misunderstood and demeaned by our cultures and religions.

I am a firm believer in the idea that culture (the way we do things here) developed over millennia in the name of pragmatism.

For example, take the prohibition of the eating of pork by some faiths.

Pigs need moisture to protect their hides and thus the instinct to find mud to wallow in.

Man witnessed pigs in mud, equated mud with dirt and disease, so a philosophy emerged wherein the consumption of pork is considered unclean.

Avoid eating a dirty animal and thus avoid disease that may emerge from the dirt seems to be the reasoning.

Consider the prohibition against promiscuity.

Did a divine advisor command monogamy and condemn pre-martial sex merely as evidence of our obedience and faith?

Or could more pragmatic concerns be the cause, such as the succession of property or the difficult demands of time and energy that comes with parenthood that should be soberly considered?

Above: Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798) was famously promiscuous.

Most men are basically still ashamed of their sexual feelings.

At best we have been taught to see male sexuality as something ordinary – just an itch to be scratched.

We come through boyhood into manhood having all kinds of cheapened messages about our deepest feelings.

Our genitalia should be wings on which to fly to Heaven, instead as viewed as inconvenient impulses.

Sexuality urgently needs to be made richer in pleasure and in meaning.

I work in Türkiye.

My wife resides in Switzerland.

I am occasionally asked how I cope with a man’s basest desires with so many miles that separate us.

I abstain.

For me, physical intimacy needs to be rich in pleasure and meaning or it becomes merely reduced to being simply an itch that needs scratching from time to time.

Not because society or religion dictates my monogamy, but rather because I want the totality of love from my wife rather than seeking solace from strangers.

A woman truly is a Wonderland in that there are more erogenous zones on her body than on the body of her male counterpart.

Women’s increasing awareness of the female body and its sexuality has led to women craving more from sex as merely a method to draw a male provider into her sway.

Her oft unspoken desire to experience the full potentiality of the sexual act has led some women to question what a woman wants beyond the urgings of procreation and the seduction of a male provider.

Women have to discover themselves then educate men in how to pleasure them.

But the reverse is also true.

Men have to understand themselves, discovering what they want and don’t want, while at the same time refusing to be demeaned or be self-demeaning.

We remain societies lacking the confidence to be able to talk honestly and easily about sex, denying ourselves more exuberant and intimate lovemaking as a result.

Instead our orgasms are as stunted as our lives.

Sex could be an aria of sensation as powerful as the collision of a truck and simultaneously as soft as snow, as majestic as a king in costume and as sensual as a slide down a slippery slope.

The real goal of lovemaking has always been the formation of a deep connection, not just of bodies intertwined and fluids flow, but the look of love reflected in the eyes of our partner, hearts open, bodies relaxed and abandoned, gradually dropping our defences in trust of each other and of the natural power that possesses you.

Lovemaking is not always so intense but it is a whole person, a whole two people, not just naughty bits co-mingling on a speed date.

Sex should be sacred where the divine sense of self is in awe, swept away by a feeling of being more than each other but rather a miracle of unity.

Where the divine in man meets the divine in woman and they are spun through space and time, knowing everything, lost in the wonder of life and love.

There is an old joke that a man spends nine months trying to get out of a woman’s womb and the rest of his lıfe trying to get back in.

Maybe there is a truism here.

We start Life as tender babies and spend our whole lives trying to regain that absolute openness and trust.

Standing on an ocean beach watching the moon rise, dining by candlelight, making love on a rug by a fireside, impulsively falling to the ground together, exploring anew the warmth beneath, that is romance, that is bringing a wild heart to an erotic body with the naked earth beneath us and the universe above.

Of course, it has been suggested that a solitary man can scratch the itch through the voyeurism of adult movies, but pornography fails men in that it can only capture the mechanical motions and not the inner qualities of sensory and emotional experience.

We need to focus less on what to do and more on what we wish to feel.

Above: Scene from From Here to Eternity (1953)

Maybe, just maybe, a belated awareness of this, caused Muggeridge to evolve from creep to compassionate companion.

Too many men are creatures of low self-esteem, unable to develop sustained intimate friendships with others, because we have never really learned to trust ourselves or others.

Despairing of happiness, some men find women much easier to see as objects to exploit rather than the complex counterparts of men.

Despairing of ever finding love and closeness, he seeks to balance the scales of constantly being denied the power of choice a woman possesses over her body by denying himself the hope of a relationship.

All human beings need to feel loved.

To be valued as we are, treated with kindness and to experience daily intimacy.

But too many men lack confidence.

Not merely sexual confidence, where sexual rejection is confused with outright rejection, but a deep sense of self worth.

Too many equate the acceptance of others as the sole validation of their worth.

Happiness is never found in anyone.

Happiness must come from within and then, and only then, it can be shared.

A man who needs to use his strength, his guile, his money or other power plays to impose his desires upon a woman then he has abandoned the difficult path of intimacy for the expressway of exploitation and may be truly lost.

I would never presume to tell another person how active or inactive an intimate life they should have.

(International Asexuality Day (IAD) is an annual celebration of the asexuality community that takes place on 6 April. 

The intention for the day is “to place a special emphasis on the international community, going beyond the anglophone and Western sphere that has so far had the most coverage“.

An international committee spent a little under a year preparing the event, as well as publishing a website and press materials.

This committee settled on the date of 6 April to avoid clashing with as many significant dates around the world as possible, although this date is subject to review and may change in future years. 

The first International Asexuality Day was celebrated in 2021 and involved asexuality organizations from at least 26 countries.

Activities included virtual meetups, advocacy programs both online and offline, and the sharing of stories in various art forms.

Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. 

It may be considered a sexual orientation or the lack thereof.

It may also be categorized more widely, to include a broad spectrum of asexual sub-identities.

Asexuality is distinct from abstention from sexual activity and from celibacy, which are behavioral and generally motivated by factors such as an individual’s personal, social, or religious beliefs.

Sexual orientation, unlike sexual behavior, is believed to be “enduring“.

Some asexual people engage in sexual activity despite lacking sexual attraction or a desire for sex, for a number of reasons, such as a desire to physically pleasure themselves or romantic partners, or a desire to have children.

Acceptance of asexuality as a sexual orientation and field of scientific research is still relatively new, as a growing body of research from both sociological and psychological perspectives has begun to develop.

While some researchers assert that asexuality is a sexual orientation, other researchers disagree.

Asexual individuals may represent about 1% of the population.

Above: A black ring may be worn on one’s right middle finger to indicate asexuality.

Various asexual communities have started to form since the impact of the Internet and social media in the mid-1990s.

The most prolific and well-known of these communities is the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, which was founded in 2001 by David Jay.

Because there is significant variation among those who identify as asexual, the term asexuality can encompass broad definitions.

Researchers generally define asexuality as the lack of sexual attraction or the lack of interest in sexual activity, though specific definitions vary — the term may be used to refer to individuals with low or absent sexual behavior or exclusively romantic non-sexual partnerships in addition to low or absent sexual desire or attraction.

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an online forum dedicated to asexuality, defines an asexual as “someone who does not experience sexual attraction“, as well as adding that asexuality “at its core” is “just a word that people use to help figure themselves out“, and encourages people to use the term asexual to define themselves “as long as it makes sense to do so“. 

Above: Asexual symbol of the AVEN community (Asexual Visibility and Education Network)

Asexuality is often abbreviated as ace, a phonetic shortening of asexual.

The community as a whole is likewise referred to as the ace community.

Above: Asexual Pride Flag

In 2001, activist David Jay founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), whose stated goals are “creating public acceptance and discussion of asexuality and facilitating the growth of an asexual community“.

Some asexuals believe that participation in an asexual community is an important resource, as they often report feeling ostracized in broader society.

Communities such as AVEN can be beneficial to those in search of answers when questioning their sexual orientation, such as providing support if one feels their lack of sexual attraction constitutes a disease.

Online asexual communities can also serve to inform others about asexuality.

However, affiliating with online communities among asexual people vary.

Some question the purpose of online communities, while others heavily depend on them for support.

Asexuality has always been present in society, though asexual people have kept a low profile.

While the failure to consummate marriage was seen as an insult to the sacrament of marriage in medieval times, it has sometimes been used as grounds to terminate a marriage, though asexuality has never been illegal.

However, the recent growth of online communication and social networking has facilitated the growth of a community built upon a common asexual identity.

Above: David Jay

Studies have found no significant statistical correlation between religion and asexuality, with asexuality occurring with equal prevalence in both religious and irreligious individuals. 

Asexuality is more common among celibate clergy, as non-asexuals are more likely to be discouraged by vows of chastity.

It has been suggested that a higher proportion of Muslim respondents reported that they did not experience any form of sexual attraction compared to Christian respondents.

Because the application of the term asexuality is relatively recent, it is unclear what stance most religions have on it.

In the Christian Bible (Matthew 19: 11 – 12), Jesus mentions:

“For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others – and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven“.

While Christianity has not directly mentioned asexuality, it has revered celibacy.

The apostle Paul, writing as a celibate, has been described by some writers as asexual. 

He writes in 1 Corinthians 7 : 6 – 9:

“I wish that all men were as I am.

But each man has his own gift from God.

One has this gift, another has that.

Now to the unmarried and the widows I say:

It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.

But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

A 2012 study published in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations reported that asexuals are evaluated more negatively in terms of prejudice, dehumanization and discrimination than other sexual minorities, such as gay men, lesbians and bisexuals.

Both homosexual and heterosexual people thought of asexuals as not only cold, but also animalistic and unrestrained.

A different study, however, found little evidence of serious discrimination against asexuals because of their asexuality. 

Asexual activist, author and blogger Julie Decker has observed that sexual harassment and violence, such as corrective rape, commonly victimizes the asexual community. 

Above: Julie Decker

Sociologist Mark Carrigan sees a middle ground, arguing that while asexuals do often experience discrimination, it is not of a phobic nature but “more about marginalization because people genuinely don’t understand asexuality“.

In works composed prior to the beginning of the 21st century, characters are generally automatically assumed to be sexual and the existence of a character’s sexuality is usually never questioned. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) portrayed his character Sherlock Holmes as what would today be classified as asexual, with the intention to characterize him as solely driven by intellect and immune to the desires of the flesh. 

Above: Sherlock Holmes

The Archie Comics character Jughead Jones was likely intended by his creators as an asexual foil to Archie’s excessive heterosexuality, but, over the years, this portrayal shifted, with various iterations and reboots of the series implying that he is either gay or heterosexual. 

In 2016, he was confirmed to be asexual in the New Riverdale Jughead comics. 

Above: Jughead Jones

Gilligan, the eponymous character of the 1960s television series Gilligan’s Island has been classified as asexual.

The producers of the show likely portrayed him in this way to make him more relatable to young male viewers of the show who had not yet reached puberty and had therefore presumably not yet experienced sexual desire. 

Gilligan‘s asexual nature also allowed the producers to orchestrate intentionally comedic situations in which Gilligan spurns the advances of attractive females.

Above: Bob Denver as Gilligan

Other fictional asexual characters include Sponge Bob Squarepants and his best friend Patrick, and Todd Chavez from Bojack Horseman – generally well-accepted by the asexual community as positive representation.)

As a cruel barb it could be said there is much ado about feeling nothing, but in fairness I cannot offer condemnation for non-participation in sexual activity either.

There could be a curious kind of freedom in not having the need for physical contact, but for so many men this need is so strong and its fulfillment gives men such intense pleasure, that I suspect that this need may be the only way a man can be controlled without resorting to force.

As a man must fulfill his sexual desires and since he tends to want exclusive rights over his partner’s intimate parts, a less sexually dependent partner can manipulate him accordingly.

A man could (and ideally should) condition his sexual needs, but instead of learning to suppress his needs, a man will allow them to be encouraged whenever possible.

The downside of being a man with strong sexual needs is that the afflicted man must become more dependent on his partner to sate his thirst and satiate his appetite.

A woman can profit from her anatomy whenever she can, while a man is often a slave to his.

I will never suggest that a person feel ashamed of his desire (or lack thereof) to experience intimacy with another mature consensual adult.

But intimacy means knowledge of who you are and who your partner is.

My only thought I wish to share here is that perhaps one should get to know one another emotionally first before discovering one another physically.

I tire of the constant bombardment that sex should be sought quickly almost as soon as the physical changes of adulthood manifest themselves.

I tire of the message that a man who is sexually inactive is not a complete man, that perhaps his masculinity must be doubted, that a man choosing to abstain is merely an excuse for his involuntary celibacy.

I tire of the message that a woman must author a transformation of her natural self, that her femininity is less the result of biology as it is a manufactured creation wrought by cosmetics, hairstyle and clothes.

I am saddened by the delusion that the raw material of a woman is insufficient to generate the desire of a man.

I am astonished by the notion that a woman making herself as diametrically different from a man as she can will in turn result in a man feeling confident enough to approach such an alien creature.

I have often believed that if your beauty can be erased by a wet tissue than there is no real beauty beneath.

Men want women they can relate to and feel comfortable with, someone whom they can trust.

If I cannot trust what I see to be real, then how can I ever get to know who you really are?

I believe a woman has a right to cover or uncover her body as she so desires.

That being said, if the attention you draw to your body distracts me from the possibilities of the magic and wonder of your heart and mind then you have reduced yourself to being an object of lust rather than allowing for the opportunity for love through getting to know who really are.

I am not anti-feminine but for every effect that you create there is a result that is produced.

And it may not always be the result that you desire.

Dress (or undress) as appropriate to the situation.

It is said that women are and that men must become.

Somehow that has mangled our minds.

If a woman cannot be accepted by a man as she is, without embellishments, then he is not a man worthy of her consideration.

The reverse is also true.

Women have high standards for the men they seek, but are they all worthy of these standards?

I leave that to your own opinion.

Men, in their desperation to feel loved, should also have standards for the women they pursue.

Women are more than external beauty and the bounty of booty.

Can they bring compassion and companionship to a man’s life?

Can they engender not just lust but as well respect and trust from a man?

What if, in a revolutionary turn of events, a woman tried to influence a man without resorting to the stimulation of his body through sensory parlour tricks but instead appealled to his heart and mind instead?

I think Muggeridge evolved from an agnostic into a zealot, for the simple reason that Man wants to believe in something, someone, beyond himself.

We cannot prove nor disprove that God exists, but we hope against hope that He does.

We scrape our souls on the restraints of religion, forgetting that religion offers only rites while faith sustains us.

Religion lends ceremony to a person’s rites of passage from birth to maturity, from the wedding to the grave.

Faith, on the other hand, suggests a design in the indecipherable, a meaning to our lives and a hope that death is merely the promise of a potential Paradise.

Agnosticism is the acceptance that the night is cold.

Faith is a search for a blanket with which to warm ourselves.

A resistance to pills and pot is merely a manifestation of the fear that those with choices are now given carte blanche to act irresponsibly.

And, yes, some of us will misbehave.

When I consider Muggeridge’s condemnation of The Life of Brian I find myself marvelling at the intensity of expression that satire or criticism seems to produce.

If God truly is all-powerful, then does He need mere mortal men to defend Him?

If God truly made Man is His image then isn’t humour and even self-mockery inherent in Man’s character also a manifestation of the nature of God?

To paraphrase the late great comedian Robin Williams, surely God must have a sense of humour, for why else place a person’s reproductive facilitıes next to a sanitation disposal?

And how else can we explain the sheer diversity of nature, the infinite variety in infinite combinations, if God had not made these for both His glory and His amusement?

Above: Robin Williams (1951 – 2014)

Consider the duck-billed platypus and tell me that God doesn’t have a sense of the absurd!

Above: Duck-billed platypus, Tasmania

As for criticism of a belief, whether religious or ideological, my feeling is that if the belief is strong it surely can sustain questioning.

As religion, though perhaps divinely inspired, is a creation of Man surely criticism offers reform and progress.

The sole comfort and counsel I can console the soul of Muggeridge with is that only through communication and contemplation will we discover who we really are and what we truly seek.

But until we learn how to openly express ourselves and actively think about our actions rather than merely reacting to the messages thrust upon us then the full potential of happiness will remain ever beyond our grasp.

Seek quality not quantity.

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Photos

• The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Best Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor

• Manhood, Steve Biddulph

• The Manipulated Man, Esther Vilar

The inner light

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Friday 5 April 2024

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

And the human race is filled with passion.

And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

To quote from Whitman:

“O me! O life!

Of the questions of these recurring

Of the endless trains of the faithless

Of cities fill’d with the foolish

What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer:

That you are here — that life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” 

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

What will your verse be?

(Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society)

Teacher’s Instructions, Encounter 51, Wall Street English

Reading Summary

“An essayist argues that young people can and should share their knowledge and wisdom with older people.

For example, young people often usually know more about technology than older people do.

Social media is one way older people can stay in touch with friends and family.

Technology can also help older people remember medical appointments and manage their shopping lists.

Older people can become inactive and disconnected from society, but young people can help them get excited about new activities, such as learning another language.“

Audio Summary

“On the Housing Project’s 10th anniversary, a speaker describes this community program to reduce homelessness.

The Project has helped a 68-year-old woman who lost her home in a fire and a widower with three teenagers who could no longer afford to pay rent.

Volunteers work to raise money and build houses.

Some volunteers are employed, while others are unemployed or retired.“

Vocabulary

Can use language related to lifestyles and living conditions of different social groups
(community; homelessness; immigrant; the poor; retired; senior)

Can use language related to less traditional family relationships (adopt; foster; orphan;
orphanage; separated)

“On the board, write:

$1,000,000

Ask the students:

“What would you do if you won $1,000,000?“

Cue cards show pictures of senior citizens, a homeless man, teenagers, a rich man, an only child playing with his parents, foster or adopted children with their new family.

Objectives

Can use language related to lifestyles and living conditions of different social groups
(community; homelessness; immigrant; the poor; retired; senior)

Can use language related to less traditional family relationships (adopt; foster; orphan;
orphanage; separated)

Can provide extra information to define exactly which or what kind of person or thing
(This is the room that I wanted.)

Can summarize and give opinions on issues and stories and answer questions in detail
(It feels good to help people.)

Above: Coordinator Paul Greaney, Wall Street English, Eskişehir

This is always an interesting unit to teach and elicit conversation.

From my limited perspective as a Canadian expat who has lived in Türkiye since March 2021, I get a sense that there is a great sense of community here than back home in the West.

Berkcan (my student) and I discussed homelessness and its causes: rent and eviction, lack of work that pays a decent wage, lack of affordable housing, lack of health and social services, debt, divorce, death of the income provider, physical and/or mental health problems, discrimination, human and natural disasters, the failings of a foster care system, and, rarely, choice.

We spoke of the challenges of immigration for both the migrant / refugee and the land where he now finds himself seeking solace.

We spoke of the difficulties of being a senior citizen – a state very uncomfortably closer for me than Berkcan.

We spoke of the tightrope of the teenage years and the demise of the family, of how a rising rate of divorce has led to broken homes.

We spoke of only children, foster children and adopted children.

Until we were left with only unanswered questions.

“Where is he?”

“How do I know?” said Cal.

“Am I supposed to look after him?”

“We have only one story.

All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.

Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.“

“The Hebrew word timshel — Thou mayest — that gives a choice.

It might be the most important word in the world.

That says the way is open.

That throws it right back on a man.

For if Thou mayest — it is also true that Thou mayest not. 

Thou mayest makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth, he has still the great choice.

He can choose his course and fight it through and win.“

(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)

The International Day of Conscience is a global day of awareness celebrated on 5 April, commemorating the importance of human conscience.

It was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 July 2019, with the adoption of UN Resolution 73/329. 

The first International Day of Conscience was celebrated on 5 April 2020.

Above: Flag of the United Nations

Conscience is a cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual’s moral philosophy or value system.

Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses, as in sympathetic central nervous system responses.

In common terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits an act that conflicts with their moral values.

The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based on reason has occasioned debate through much of modern history between theories of basics in ethic of human life in juxtaposition to the theories of romanticism and other reactionary movements after the end of the Middle Ages.

Religious views of conscience usually see it as linked to a morality inherent in all humans, to a beneficent universe and/or to divinity.

The diverse ritualistic, mythical, doctrinal, legal, institutional and material features of religion may not necessarily cohere with experiential, emotive, spirıtual or contemplative considerations about the origin and operation of conscience.

Common secular or scientific views regard the capacity for conscience as probably genetically determined, with its subject probably learned or imprinted as part of a culture.

Commonly used metaphors for conscience include the “voice within“, the “inner light“, or even Socrates’ reliance on what the Greeks called his “daimonic sign“, an averting inner voice heard only when he was about to make a mistake.

Above: The Good Samaritan, Vincent van Gogh, 1890

Conscience is a concept in national and international law, is increasingly conceived of as applying to the world as a whole, has motivated numerous notable acts for the public good and been the subject of many prominent examples of literature, music and film.

Above: Seated Buddha, 2nd century. The Buddha linked conscience with compassion for those who must endure cravings and suffering in the world until right conduct culminates in right mindfulness and right contemplation.

Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden was willingly jailed for refusing to pay a tax because he profoundly disagreed with a government policy and was frustrated by the corruption and injustice of the democratic machinery of the state.

“Unjust laws exist.

Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavour to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? 

A man has not everything to do but something.

And because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it.

I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.

I do not care to trace the course of my dollar if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with —the dollar is innocent — but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?

Why has every man a conscience, then?”

(Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1848)

Above: Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

In a notable contemporary act of conscience, Christian bushwalker Brenda Hean (1910 – 1972) protested against the flooding of Lake Pedder despite threats and that ultimately led to her death. 

Above: Lake Pedder, southwest Tasmania, taken between late 1968 and mid 1972, prior to the lake being enlarged by the construction of three dams

Another was the campaign by Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941 – 1995) against oil extraction by multinational corporations in Nigeria that led to his execution.

Above: Ken Saro-Wiwa

So too was the act by the Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel photographed holding his shopping bag in the path of tanks during the protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on 5 June 1989. 

Above: Tank Man (Tiananmen Square protester)

The actions of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld to try to achieve peace in the Congo despite the (eventuating) threat to his life were strongly motivated by conscience as is reflected in his diary, Vägmärken (Markings).

Above: Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 – 1961)

Another example involved the actions of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr. to try to prevent the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War.

Above: Hugh Tompson Jr. (1943 – 2006)

Evan Pederick voluntarily confessed and was convicted of the Sydney Hilton bombing stating that his conscience could not tolerate the guilt and that “I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent.” 

Above: Sydney Hilton Hotel

Vasili Arkhipov was a Russian naval officer on out-of-radio-contact Soviet submarine B-59 being depth-charged by US warships during the Cuban Missile Crisis whose dissent when two other officers decided to launch a nuclear torpedo (unanimous agreement to launch was required) may have averted a nuclear war.

Above: Vasili Arkhipov (1926 – 1998)

In 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc performed a famous act of self-immolation to protest against persecution of his faith by the Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

Above: Portrait of Bo Tat Quang Duc (1897 – 1963)

Conscience played a major role in the actions by anaesthetist Stephen Bolsin to whistleblow on incompetent paediatric cardiac surgeons at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

Above: Stephen Bolson

Jeffrey Wigand was motivated by conscience to expose the Big Tobacco scandal, revealing that executives of the companies knew that cigarettes were addictive and approved the addition of carcinogenic ingredients to the cigarettes. 

Above: Jeffrey Wigand

David Graham, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee, was motivated by conscience to whistleblow that the arthritis pain-reliever Vioxx increased the risk of cardiovascular deaths although the manufacturer suppressed this information. 

Rick Piltz, from the US global warming Science Program, blew the whistle on a White House official who ignored majority scientific opinion to edit a climate change report (“Our Changing Planet“) to reflect the Bush administration’s view that the problem was unlikely to exist. 

Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was imprisoned and tortured for his act of conscience in throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. 

Above: Muntadhar al-Zaidi

Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli former nuclear technician, acted on conscience to reveal details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986, was kidnapped by Israeli agents, transported to Israel, convicted of treason and spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement.

Above: Mordechai Vanunu

At the awards ceremony for the 200 metres at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman ignored death threats and official warnings to take part in an anti-racism protest that destroyed their respective careers. 

W. Mark Felt, an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who retired in 1973 as the Bureau’s Associate Director, acted on conscience to provide reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that resulted in the Watergate scandal. 

Above: Mark Felt (1913 – 2008)

Conscience was a major factor in US Public Health Service officer Peter Buxtun revealing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to the public. 

Above: Peter Buxton

The 2008 attack by the Israeli military on civilian areas of Palestinian Gaza was described as a “stain on the world’s conscience“.

Above: Flag of Palestine

Conscience was a major factor in the refusal of Aung San Suu Kyi to leave Burma (Myanmar) despite house arrest and persecution by the military dictatorship in that country.

Above: Aung San Suu Kyi

Conscience was a factor in Peter Galbraith’s criticism of fraud in the 2009 Afghanistan election despite it costing him his UN job.

Above: Peter Galbraith

Conscience motivated Bunnatine Greenhouse to expose irregularities in the contracting of the Halliburton company for work in Iraq. 

Above: Bunny Greenhouse

Naji al-Ali (1938 – 1987), a popular cartoon artist in the Arab world, loved for his defense of the ordinary people, and for his criticism of repression and despotism by both the Israeli military and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was murdered for refusing to compromise with his conscience.

Above: Naji al Ali graffitı, Ramallah, Palestine

The journalist Anna Politkovskaya provided (prior to her murder) an example of conscience in her opposition to the Second Chechen War (1999 – 2005) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Above: Anna Politkovskaja (1958 – 2006)

Conscience motivated the Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who was abducted and murdered in Grozny, Chechnya in 2009. 

Above: Portrait of Natalia Estemirova (1958 – 2009)

The death of Neda Agha-Soltan arose from conscience-driven protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election.

Above: Neda Agha-Soltan (1983 – 2009)

Muslim lawyer Shirin Ebadi (winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize) has been described as the ‘conscience of the Islamic Republic‘ for her work in protecting the human rights of women and children in Iran.

Above: Shirin Ebadi

The human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, often referred to as the ‘conscience of China‘ and who had previously been arrested and allegedly tortured after calling for respect for human rights and for constitutional reform, was abducted by Chinese security agents in February 2009.

Above: Gao Zhisheng

2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in his final statement before being sentenced by a closed Chinese court to over a decade in jail as a political prisoner of conscience stated:

“For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit.” 

Above: Liu Xiaobo (1955 – 2017)

Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Russia, was arrested, held without trial for almost a year and died in custody, as a result of exposing corruption.

Above: Sergei Magnitsky (1972 – 2009)

On 6 October 2001, Laura Whittle was a naval gunner on HMAS Adelaide under orders to implement a new border protection policy when they encountered the SIEV-4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel-4) refugee boat in choppy seas.

After being ordered to fire warning shots from her 50-calibre machine gun to make the boat turn back she saw it beginning to break up and sink with a father on board holding out his young daughter that she might be saved.

Whittle jumped without a life vest 12 metres into the sea to help save the refugees from drowning thinking:

“This isn’t right.

This isn’t how things should be.“

In February 2012, journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and killed by the Syrian Army in Homs during the 2011 – 2012 Syrian uprising and Siege of Homs, after she decided to stay at the “epicentre of the storm” in order to “expose what is happening“.

Above: Marie Colvin (1956 – 2012)

In October 2012, the Taliban organised the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai a teenage girl who had been campaigning, despite their threats, for female education in Pakistan.

Above: Malala Yousafzai

The December 2012 Delhi gang rape case was said to have stirred the collective conscience of India to civil disobedience and public protest at the lack of legal action against rapists in that country. 

Above: Silent protest at India Gate related to 2012 Delhi gang rape case, 21 December 2012

In June 2013, Edward Snowden revealed details of the US National Security Agency (NSA) Internet and electronic communication PRISM surveillance program because of a conscience-felt obligation to the freedom of humanity greater than obedience to the laws that bound his employment.

Above: Edward Snowden

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in A Very Easy Death (Une mort très douce, 1964) reflects within her own conscience about her mother’s attempts to develop such a moral sympathy and understanding of others.

“The sight of her tears grieved me, but I soon realised that she was weeping over her failure, without caring about what was happening inside me.

We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy.

I know now what prevented her from doing so:

She had too much to pay back, too many wounds to salve, to put herself in another’s place.

In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself.

Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart?

As for discovering an attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing:

The unexpected sent her into a panic, because she had been taught never to think, act or feel except in a ready-made framework.”

(Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 1982)

Above: Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986)

The ancient epic of the Indian subcontinent, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, contains two pivotal moments of conscience.

The first occurs when the warrior Arjuna being overcome with compassion against killing his opposing relatives in war, receives counsel from Krishna about his spiritual duty (“work as though you are performing a sacrifice for the general good“). 

The second, at the end of the saga, is when King Yudhishthira having alone survived the moral tests of life, is offered eternal bliss, only to refuse it because a faithful dog is prevented from coming with him by purported divine rules and laws. 

Above: The Mahabharata

The French author Montaigne (1533 – 1592) in one of the most celebrated of his essays (“On experience“) expressed the benefits of living with a clear conscience:

“Our duty is to compose our character, not to compose books, to win not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct.

Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly.” 

Above: Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

In his famous Japanese travel journal Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) composed of mixed haiku poetry and prose, Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) in attempting to describe the eternal in this perishable world is often moved in conscience.

For example, by a thicket of summer grass being all that remains of the dreams and ambitions of ancient warriors. 

Above: Portrait of Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694)

Chaucer’s “the Franklin’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales recounts how a young suitor releases a wife from a rash promise because of the respect in his conscience for the freedom to be truthful, gentle and generous.

Above: Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400)

The critic A.C. Bradley discusses the central problem of Shakespeare’s tragic character Hamlet as one where conscience in the form of moral scruples deters the young Prince with his “great anxiety to do right” from obeying his father’s hell-bound ghost and murdering the usurping King (“isn’t perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?“).

Bradley develops a theory about Hamlet’s moral agony relating to a conflict between “traditional” and “critical” conscience:

“The conventional moral ideas of his time, which he shared with the Ghost, told him plainly that he ought to avenge his father, but a deeper conscience in him, which was in advance of his time, contended with these explicit conventional ideas.

It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not, but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio.

And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him“.

The opening words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (“They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none“) have been admired as a description of conscience.

Above: William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

So has John Donne’s commencement of his poem Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward:

“Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,

Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is;”

Above: John Donne (1571 – 1631)

Anton Chekhov in his plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters describes the tortured emotional states of doctors who at some point in their careers have turned their back on conscience. 

In his short stories, Chekhov also explored how people misunderstood the voice of a tortured conscience.

A promiscuous student, for example, in The Fit describes it as a “dull pain, indefinite, vague.

It was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair in his breast, under the heart.”

The young doctor examining the misunderstood agony of compassion experienced by the factory owner’s daughter in From a Case Book calls it an “unknown, mysterious power in fact close at hand and watching him“. 

Characteristically, Chekhov’s own conscience drove him on the long journey to Sakhalin to record and alleviate the harsh conditions of the prisoners at that remote outpost.

As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work:

“Abandoning everything, he travelled to the distant island of Sakhalin, the most feared place of exile and forced labour in Russia at that time.

One cannot help but wonder why?

Simply, because the lot of the people there was a bitter one, because nobody really knew about the lives and deaths of the exiles, because he felt that they stood in greater need of help that anyone else.

A strange reason, maybe, but not for a writer who was the epitome of all the best traditions of a Russian man of letters.

Russian literature has always focused on questions of conscience and was, therefore, a powerful force in the moulding of public opinion.”

Above: Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)

E.H. Carr writes of Dostoevsky’s character the young student Raskolnikov in the novel Crime and Punishment who decides to murder a ‘vile and loathsome‘ old woman money lender on the principle of transcending conventional morals:

“The sequel reveals to us not the pangs of a stricken conscience (which a less subtle writer would have given us) but the tragic and fruitless struggle of a powerful intellect to maintain a conviction which is incompatible with the essential nature of man.”

Above: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)

Hermann Hesse wrote his Siddhartha to describe how a young man in the time of the Buddha follows his conscience on a journey to discover a transcendent inner space where all things could be unified and simply understood, ending up discovering that personal truth through selfless service as a ferryman.

Above: Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)

J.R.R. Tolkien in his epic The Lord of the Rings describes how only the hobbit Frodo is pure enough in conscience to carry the Ring of Power through war-torn Middle Earth to destruction in the Cracks of Doom, Frodo determining at the end to journey without weapons, and being saved from failure by his earlier decision to spare the life of the creature Gollum.

Above: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973)

Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote that Albert Camus was the writer most representative of the Western consciousness and conscience in its relation to the non-Western world. 

Above: French philosopher / writer Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird portrays Atticus Finch as a lawyer true to his conscience who sets an example to his children and community.

Above: Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)

The Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons focuses on the conscience of Catholic lawyer Thomas More in his struggle with King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547): 

“The loyal subject is more bounden to be loyal to his conscience than to any other thing.” 

Above: Thomas More (1478 – 1535)

George Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on the isolated island of Jura, Scotland to describe how a man (Winston Smith) attempts to develop critical conscience in a totalitarian state which watches every action of the people and manipulates their thinking with a mixture of propaganda, endless war and thought control through language control (double think and newspeak) to the point where prisoners look up to and even love their torturers.

In the Ministry of Love, Winston’s torturer (O’Brien) states:

“You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us.

But we create human nature.

Men are infinitely malleable.”

Above: Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) (1903 – 1950)

A tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica depicting a massacre of innocent women and children during the Spanish Civil War is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room, demonstrably as a spur to the conscience of representatives from the nation states. 

Above: Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

Albert Tucker painted Man’s Head to capture the moral disintegration, and lack of conscience, of a man convicted of kicking a dog to death.

Above: Antipodean Head, Albert Tucker, 1964

The impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1878 that:

“One must never let the fire in one’s soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed.

And he who chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure and will hear the voice of his conscience address him every more clearly.

He who hears that voice, which is God’s greatest gift, in his innermost being and follows it, finds in it a friend at last, and he is never alone! 

That is what all great men have acknowledged in their works, all those who have thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who have plumbed the depths of the sea of life.“

Above: Self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890)

The 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal portrays the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning disillusioned from the Crusades (“What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe, but aren’t able to?“) across a plague-ridden landscape, undertaking a game of chess with the personification of Death until he can perform one meaningful altruistic act of conscience (overturning the chess board to distract Death long enough for a family of jugglers to escape in their wagon).

Casablanca (1942) centers on the development of conscience in the cynical American Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in the face of oppression by the Nazis and the example of the resistance leader Victor Laszlo.

The David Lean and Robert Bolt screenplay for Doctor Zhivago (an adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel) focuses strongly on the conscience of a doctor-poet in the midst of the Russian Revolution. 

(In the end “the walls of his heart were like paper“.)

The 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner focuses on the struggles of conscience between and within a bounty hunter (Rick Deckard) and a renegade replicant android (Roy Batty) in a future society which refuses to accept that forms of artificial intelligence can have aspects of being such as conscience.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his last great choral composition the Mass in B minor to express the alternating emotions of loneliness, despair, joy and rapture that arise as conscience reflects on a departed human life. 

Here Bach’s use of counterpoint and contrapuntal settings, his dynamic discourse of melodically and rhythmically distinct voices seeking forgiveness of sins (“Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis“) evokes a spiraling moral conversation of all humanity expressing his belief that “with devotional music, God is always present in his grace“.

Above: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)

Ludwig van Beethoven’s meditations on illness, conscience and mortality in the Late Spring Quartets led to his dedicating the 3rd movement of String Quartet in A Minor Op. 132 as a “hymn of Thanksgiving to God of a convalescent“. 

Above: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)

John Lennon’s work “Imagine” owes much of its popular appeal to its evocation of conscience against the atrocities created by war, religious fundamentalism and politics. 

The Beatles George Harrison-written track “The Inner Light” sets to Indian raga music a verse from the Tao Te Ching that:

“Without going out of your door you can know the ways of Heaven.”

In the 1986 movie The Mission the guilty conscience and penance of the slave trader Mendoza is made more poignant by the haunting oboe music of Ennio Morricone (“On Earth as it is in Heaven“).

The song “Sweet Lullaby” by Deep Forest is based on a traditional Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands called “Rorogwela” in which a young orphan is comforted as an act of conscience by his older brother.

The Dream Academy song ‘Forest Fire‘ provided an early warning of the moral dangers of our ‘black cloud‘ ‘bringing down a different kind of weather, letting the sunshine in, that’s how the end begins“.

The American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) presents the Conscience in Media Award to journalists whom the Society deems worthy of recognition for demonstrating “singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice“.

The Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International’s most prestigious human rights award, takes its inspiration from a poem written by Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney called “The Republic of Conscience“.

Above: Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

(Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh)

Above: Still life with Bible, Vincent van Gogh, 1885

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue

Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night

You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could’ve told you Vincent
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame-less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget

Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will

Above: The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Photos

• Dead Poets Society (film) (1989)

• Wall Street English

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck

• Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau

• A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir

• Essays, Michel de Montaigne

• Hamlet, William Shakespeare

• “Sonnet 94“, William Shakespeare

• “Good Friday 1613“, John Donne

• Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

• Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh

• The Seventh Seal (film)(1957)

• Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

• “Starry, Starry Night“, Don McLean

Rites of passage

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Thursday 4 April 2024

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

It was a peculiarly beautiful book.

Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.

Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off.

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.

Actually he was not used to writing by hand.

He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second.

A tremor had gone through his bowels.

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

In small clumsy letters he wrote:

“April 4th, 1984.“

(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four)

“This morning I polished up an old box I found upstairs.

It is of walnut with black and yellow inlay and a brass crest on the lid.

It makes a beautiful box for relics – so in went all the letters, pressed flowers, Niersteiner corks, handkerchiefs, Tilia platyphyllos, etc.

It will still hold a few more letters, though it is quite nicely filled.

I wonder what will happen to it.

If I were to die tomorrow I should either have it sent back to him or buried with me (probably the latter) – but as it seems not very likely that I shall, I daresay it may be in my possession for years and years, until one day it becomes junk again and the box returns to the place where I found it – perhaps with the relics still in it.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

Above: Cemetery in China

What a great pleasure and delight there is in being really sentimental.

I thought about this as I picked flowers in the garden this morning – violets – a great patch of them smelling lovely, sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, primroses plain and coloured, scyllas and wild celandines, so very much spring flowers.

People who are not sentimental, who never keep relics, brood on anniversaries, kiss photographs “good night” and “good morning”, must miss a good deal.

Of course it is all rather self-conscious and cultivated, but it comes do easily that at least a little of it must spring from the heart.

I could write a lovely metaphysical poem about the relics of love in a box.

Perhaps I will – for his 70th birthday (in March 1989).“

(3 April 1940, Barbara Pym)

Swift swallows and spring days were shuttling by;

Of ninety radiant ones three score had fled.

Young grass spread all its green to heaven’s rim

Some blossoms marked pear branches with white dots.

Now came the Feast of Light in the third month

With graveyard rites and junkets on the green.

As merry pilgrims flocked from near and far,

The sisters and their brother went for a stroll.

The Tale of Kiều, Nguyen Du

Above: The first page of the Tale of Kiều

The Qingming Festival or Ching Ming Festival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day in English (sometimes also called Chinese Memorial Day, Ancestors’ Day, the Clear Brightness Festival, or the Pure Brightness Festival), is a traditional Chinese festival observed by ethnic Chinese in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. 

A celebration of spring, it falls on the first day of the fifth solar term (also called Qingming) of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar.

This makes it the 15th day after the Spring Equinox, either on 4, 5 or 6 April in a given year.

During Qingming, Chinese families visit the tombs of their ancestors to clean the gravesites and make ritual offerings to their ancestors. 

Offerings would typically include traditional food dishes and the burning of joss sticks and joss paper.

Above: Joss sticks / incense

Above: Stacks of joss paper for sale at a store

The holiday recognizes the traditional reverence of one’s ancestors in Chinese culture.

Above: The Classic of Filial Piety

The origins of the Qingming Festival go back more than 2,500 years, although the observance has changed significantly.

It became a public holiday in mainland China in 2008, where it is associated with the consumption of gingtuan, green dumplings made of glutinous rice and Chinese mugwort or barley grass.

Above: Qingtuan, traditional Chinese food of the Qingming festival

Above: Chapssal (glutinous rice)

Above: Barley field

In Taiwan, the public holiday was in the past observed on 5 April to honor the death of Chiang Kai-shek on that day in 1975, but with Chiang’s popularity waning, this convention is not being observed.

Above: Chinese politician / revolutionary / military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887 – 1975)

A confection called caozaiguo or shuchuguo, made with Jersey cudweed, is consumed there.

Above: Tsukakkue or caozai guo, steamed glutinous flour dumpling with herbal wrapper

A similar holiday is observed in the Ryukyu Islands, called Shīmī in the local language.

The festival originated from the Cold Food or Hanshi Festival which is said to commemorate Jie Zitui, a nobleman of the state of Jin (modern Shanxi) during the Spring and Autumn Period.

Above: Song dynasty painting attributed to Li Tang, showing the return of Chong’er from exile to the state of Jin. He became Duke Wen and reigned from 636 to 628 BC.

Above: Temple on Mt Mian near Jiexiu, Shanxi, China

Amid the Li Ji Unrest (657 – 651 BC), he followed his master Prince Chong’er in 655 BC to exile among the Di tribes and around China.

Supposedly, he once even cut flesh from his own thigh to provide his lord with soup.

In 636 BC, Duke Mu of Qin invaded Jin and enthroned Chong’er as its duke, where he was generous in rewarding those who had helped him in his time of need.

Owing either to his own high-mindedness or to the duke’s neglect, however, Jie was long passed over. 

He finally retired to the forest around Mount Mian with his elderly mother. 

The duke went to the forest in 636 BC but could not find them.

He then ordered his men to set fire to the forest in order to force Jie out. 

When Jie and his mother were killed instead, the duke ordered that thenceforth no one should light a fire on the date of Jie’s death. 

The people of Shanxi subsequently revered Jie as an immortal and avoided lighting fires for as long as a month in the depths of winter, a practice so injurious to children and the elderly that the area’s rulers unsuccessfully attempted to ban it for centuries.

A compromise finally developed where it was restricted to 3 days around the Qingming solar term in mid-spring.

Above: Mt Mian near Jiexiu, Shanxi, China

The present importance of the holiday is credited to Emperor Xuanzong of Tang.

Above: Portrait of Tang Xuanzong Li Longji (685 – 762)

Wealthy citizens in China were reportedly holding too many extravagant and ostentatiously expensive ceremonies in honour of their ancestors.

Above: Tong’s ancestral hall, Lantern Festival offering

In AD 732, Xuanzong sought to curb this practice by declaring that such respects could be formally paid only once a year, on Qingming.

Qingming Festival is when Chinese people traditionally visit ancestral tombs to sweep them.

This tradition has been legislated by the Emperors who built majestic imperial tombstones for every dynasty.

For thousands of years, the Chinese imperials, nobility, peasantry and merchants alike have gathered together to remember the lives of the departed, to visit their tombstones to perform Confucian filial piety by tombsweeping, to visit burial grounds, graveyards or in modern urban cities, the city columbaria, to perform groundskeeping and maintenance and to commit to pray for their ancestors in the uniquely Chinese concept of the afterlife and to offer remembrances of their ancestors to living blood relatives, their kith and kin.

In some places, people believe that sweeping the tomb is only allowed during this festival, as they believe the dead will get disturbed if the sweeping is done on other days.

Above: An Chinese-Indonesian family prays for their deceased members at Sanggar Agung Temple, Surabaya

The young and old alike kneel down to offer prayers before tombstones of the ancestors, offer the burning of joss in both the forms of incense sticks (joss-sticks) and silver-leafed paper (joss paper), sweep the tombs and offer food in memory of the ancestors. 

Depending on the religion of the observers, some pray to a higher deity to honour their ancestors, while others may pray directly to the ancestral spirits.

People who live far away and can’t travel to their ancestors’ tombs may make a sacrifice from a distance.

Above: Qingming Festival, Chonghe Dong Cemetery, Kolkata, India

These rites have a long tradition in Asia, especially among the imperialty who legislated these rituals into a national religion.

They have been preserved especially by the peasantry and are most popular with farmers today, who believe that continued observances will ensure fruitful harvests ahead by appeasing the spirits in the other world.

Religious symbols of ritual purity, such as pomegranate and willow branches, are popular at this time.

Above: Pomegranate

Some people wear willow twigs on their heads on Qingming or stick willow branches on their homes.

There are similarities to palm leaves used on Palm Sundays in Christianity.

Both are religious rituals.

Furthermore, the belief is that the willow branches will help ward off misfortune.

Above: Golden weeping willow

After gathering on Qingming to perform Confucian clan and family duties at the tombstones, graveyards or columbaria, participants spend the rest of the day in clan or family outings, before they start the spring plowing.

Historically, people would often sing and dance.

Qingming was a time when young couples traditionally started courting. 

Another popular thing to do is to fly kites in the shapes of animals or characters from folk tales or Chinese opera. 

Above: Shao opera performance of The Limestone Rhyme, a historical play set in the Ming dynasty, in Shanghai

Another common practice is to carry flowers instead of burning paper, incense or firecrackers.

Traditionally, a family will burn spirit money (joss paper) and paper replicas of material goods such as cars, homes, phones and paper servants.

This action usually happens during the Qingming festival. 

Above: Imitation paper money (issued by “The Bank of Heaven and Earth“) and yuanbao burnt at ancestors’ graves around the time of the Ghost Festival. (Jiangsu Province)

In Chinese culture, it is believed that people still need all of those things in the afterlife.

Then family members take turns to kowtow three to nine times (depending on the family adherence to traditional values) before the tomb of the ancestors.

The kowtowing ritual in front of the grave is performed in the order of patriarchal seniority within the family.

After the ancestor worship at the grave site, the whole family or the whole clan feast on the food and drink they have brought for the worship.

Above: Three people ‘kowtowing‘ to an altar, one woman crying, others smoking opium in paying their last respects to a Chinese merchant’s wife

Another ritual related to the festival is the cockfight, as well as being available within that historic and cultural context at Kaifeng Millennium City Park (Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden).

Above: Cock fight

Above: Dragon Pavilion, Kaifeng, Henan Province, China

The holiday is often marked by people paying respects to those who are considered national or legendary heroes or those exemplary Chinese figures who died in events considered politically sensitive.

The April 5th Movement and the Tiananmen Incident were major events in Chinese history which occurred on Qingming.

After Premier Zhou Enlai died in 1976, thousands honored him during the festival to pay their respects.

Above: Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (1898 – 1976)

Above: Tiananmen Incident – Crowds of mourners gathering in Tiananmen Square on 5 April 1976

Some also pay respects to politically sensitive people such as Zhao Ziyang.

Above: Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang (1919 – 2005)

In Taiwan, the Qingming Festival was not a public holiday until 1972.

Above: Flag of Taiwan

Three years later, upon the death of Chiang Kai-shek on 5 April 1975, the Kuomintang government declared that the anniversary of Chiang’s death be observed alongside the festival.

The practice was abolished in 2007.

Above: Emblem of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party

Despite the festival having no official status, the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asian nations, such as those in Singapore and Malaysia, take this festival seriously and observe its traditions faithfully.

Above: Flag of Singapore

Some Qingming rituals and ancestral veneration decorum observed by the overseas Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore can be dated back to Ming and Qing dynasties, as the overseas communities were not affected by the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China.

Above: Colored papers placed on a grave during Qingming Festival, Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore

Qingming in Malaysia is an elaborate family function or a clan feast (usually organized by the respective clan association) to commemorate and honour recently deceased relatives at their grave sites and distant ancestors from China at home altars, clan temples or makeshift altars in Buddhist or Taoist temples.

Above: Flag of Malaysia

For the overseas Chinese community, the Qingming festival is very much a solemn family event and, at the same time, a family obligation.

They see this festival as a time of reflection for honouring and giving thanks to their forefathers.

Overseas Chinese normally visit the graves of their recently deceased relatives on the weekend nearest to the actual date.

According to the ancient custom, grave site veneration is only permissible ten days before and after the Qingming Festival.

If the visit is not on the actual date, normally veneration before Qingming is encouraged.

Above: Flag of China

The Qingming Festival in Malaysia and Singapore normally starts early in the morning by paying respect to distant ancestors from China at home altars.

This is followed by visiting the graves of close relatives in the country.

Some follow the concept of filial piety to the extent of visiting the graves of their ancestors in mainland China.

Above: (in dark green) China and (in light green) Taiwan

During the Tang dynasty, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang promoted large-scale tug of war games, using ropes of up to 167 metres (548 ft) with shorter ropes attached and more than 500 people on each end of the rope.

Each side also had its own team of drummers to encourage the participants. 

In honour of these customs, families often go hiking or kiting, play Chinese soccer or tug-of-war and plant trees, including willow trees.

The Qingming festival is also a part of spiritual and religious practices in China, and is associated with Buddhism.

For example, Buddhism teaches that those who die with guilt are unable to eat in the afterlife, except on the day of the Qingming festival.

Above: The Dharma Wheel, a symbol of Buddhism

The Qingming festival holiday has a significance in the Chinese tea culture since this specific day divides the fresh green teas by their picking dates.

Green teas made from leaves picked before this date are given the prestigious ‘pre-Qingming tea’ designation which commands a much higher price tag.

These teas are prized for their aroma, taste, and tenderness.

The Qingming festival was originally considered the day with the best spring weather, when many people would go out and travel.

The Old Book of Tang describes this custom and mentions of it may be found in ancient poetry.

Above: Along the River During the Qingming Festival, detail of the original version showing wooden bridge

China and those springing from Chinese culture are not unique for commemorating or communing with the dead.

All Saints’ Day (1 November) and All Souls’ Day (2 November) are two Christian observances commemorating the dead.

Above: All-Saints

Above: The Day of the Dead (1859), William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The Day of the Dead (1 November) is a a Mexican celebration similar to the Qingming Festival.

Above: Traditional Day of the Dead altar in Milpa Alta, Mexico City, Mexico

The veneration of the dead, including one’s ancestors, is based on love and respect for the deceased.

In some cultures, it is related to beliefs that the dead have a continued existence and may possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living.

Some groups venerate their direct, familial ancestors.

Certain religious groups, in particular the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church venerate saints as intercessors with God.

The latter also believes in prayer for departed souls in Purgatory.

Other religious groups, however, consider veneration of the dead to be idolatry and a sin.

In European, Asian, Oceanian, African and Afro-diasporic cultures (which includes but should be distinguished from multiple cultures and Indigenous populations in the Americas who were never influenced by the African Diaspora), the goal of ancestor veneration is to ensure the ancestors’ continued well-being and positive disposition towards the living, and sometimes to ask for special favours or assistance.

The social or non-religious function of ancestor veneration is to cultivate kinship values, such as filial piety, family loyalty, and continuity of the family lineage.

Ancestor veneration occurs in societies with every degree of social, political, and technological complexity, and it remains an important component of various religious practices in modern times.

Ancestor reverence is not the same as the worship of a deity or deities.

In some Afro-diasporic cultures, ancestors are seen as being able to intercede on behalf of the living, often as messengers between humans and God.

As spirits who were once human themselves, they are seen as being better able to understand human needs than would a divine being.

In other cultures, the purpose of ancestor veneration is not to ask for favors but to do one’s filial duty.

Some cultures believe that their ancestors actually need to be provided for by their descendants, and their practices include offerings of food and other provisions.

Others do not believe that the ancestors are even aware of what their descendants do for them, but that the expression of filial piety is what is important.

Most cultures who practice ancestor veneration do not call it “ancestor worship“.

In English, the word worship usually but not always refers to the reverent love and devotion accorded a deity (god) or God. 

However, in other cultures, this act of worship does not confer any belief that the departed ancestors have become some kind of deity.

Rather, the act is a way to express filial duty, devotion and respect and look after ancestors in their afterlives as well as seek their guidance for their living descendants.

In this regard, many cultures and religions have similar practices.

Some may visit the graves of their parents or other ancestors, leave flowers and pray to them in order to honor and remember them, while also asking their ancestors to continue to look after them.

However, this would not be considered as worshipping them since the term worship may not always convey such meaning in the exclusive and narrow context of certain Western European Christian traditions.

Above: A scenic cemetery in rural Spain

My own view of remembering the dead may be specific to me only.

I was raised by foster parents who, for all their virtues, made no doubt that their desire to care for me revolved on the funding that the province provided for my maintenance.

They have long since passed away and are buried in the shadow of Mount Maple in Ogdensburg Cemetery, St. Philippe d’Argenteuil, Québec, Canada.

I have visited their grave perhaps twice since their demise from cancer.

I search for filial feelings but they lie buried beneath the surface.

I sought out my biological family in a journey that took me to the residences of my father and siblings scattered across Canada and to the birthplace and final resting place of my mother in the States.

My mother is buried in a pauper’s field in a Fort Lauderdale cemetery next to a factory painted with the slogan “Baby Love“.

No irony lost there.

It is said that blood is thicker than water, but what isn’t said is that time spent together is what creates that bond within a family.

I was separated from my biological family as a toddler and reunited for a brief time after two decades had passed.

Lost time cannot build bridges.

Filial feelings cannot be manufactured.

I envy people who have had the good fortune to have had a family worthy of reverence.

But, in spite of the imperfections of my past, I do have reverence for the past.

But the past is only relevant to me in the manner in which it makes me feel in the present.

Standing upon the graves of those who once lived should provoke within me a sense of who they were and what they meant to me and others.

Above: Kerepesi Cemetery, Budapest, Hungary

Rarely do researchers or writers “let their hair down“, revealing that they started where each of us must start:

With mere infatuation for a subject.

The messy beginnings of all serious inquiries are hidden from our view in that “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” where, as W.B. Yeats asserted, “all the ladders start“, so we tend to get a misleading picture of how intellectual and creative projects got started.

Finding those subjects that connect with something within you can be done by starting a journal, reconnoitering new realms of knowledge, entering a field and developing your first projects.

Before you immerse yourself in the “literature of the field” you can and should let your own imagination play and come up with some theories of your own.

This sounds presumptious to most people.

We were all taught to believe that you need to learn what other people have found and thought before knowing enough to offer your own ideas.

Of course, it makes sense to take full advantage of your predecessors.

Your own ideas should eventually take into account what is already known, but imaginative conjectures at an early stage can be exicting, harmless and occasionally rewarding.

By adding this stage to the usual scientific research procedure, you join the creative vanguard in your discipline rather than merely collect data or absorb the conclusions of other scholars.

By bringing in spontaneous thinking prior to the detailed research, the stage is set for its continuation and fruition in fresh and sound conclusions at the end of the project.

Formulate your own best spontaneous solution at that point.

Then, review and compare your solution with those advocated by others and assemble whatever additional facts now appear pertinent.

Finally, synthesize your own ideas with those of others.

Those others are both those with whom you have formed a network and with those from whom have learned from their example – our predecessors.

In most fields of endeavour, it is unlikely that you would be able to get one-to-one tuition from the people at the top.

If you wanted to be a top tennis pro, for example, even if you could afford it, how could you persuade someone like Andy Murray to give you a series of private lessons?

He is a busy man!

Above: British professional tennis player Andy Murray

The same is also true of many areas of the arts, but in the field of creative writing your perfect mentors are always available.

Your favourite writers are there, they are free, and they are present for as long as you need them.

There is absolutely nothing to stop you spending weeks locked up alone with Tolstoy (or with Philip Roth, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Jackie Collins or Woody Allen).

Above: Russian writer / activist Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

Find inspiration in the work of others.

Whoever your inspiration is, they are waiting for you.

Dead or alive, mad or bad, the greatest writers are available as your guides.

You don’t have to rely on YouTube or on grainy footage of long-lost champions in order to study technique.

You can bring their work home with you and focus on it in microscopic detail and in your own time.

Above: American writer Philip Roth (1933 – 2018)

Read other writers.

Make a short list of all the writers whose works you have found most inspiring.

Reacquaint yourself with your heroes.

Try asking around among your friends, family and work colleagues for examples of writing that they have found particularly impressive.

Reading, more than anything else, is what will help you improve as a writer.

Reading good work carefully is the fastest way to see visible developments in your own writing life.

Above: American poet Sharon Olds

It helps to have an open mind and a willingness to experiment in your reading tastes.

Try not to be too dismissive of work you see championed in the press or online.

On the other hand, reading something and then thinking, “I could do better than that.”, is a perfectly legitimate response.

It can be inspiring to find a writer who has legions of admirers but who in your opinion is not actually such hot stuff.

That’s fine, but I would keep that opinion to yourself for a little while!

Above: Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)

What inspired great works that are still read decades or even centuries after they were written?

What did master writers do when they were stuck for an idea?

What methods gave some of them a never-ending flow of stories?

Above: English romance novelist / actress Jackie Collins (1937 – 2015)

It starts with someone else’s words.

Many noted authors have said they were deeply moved by what they read as youngsters. In some cases it was one partıcular book that made them want to be writers and to which they still return for inspiration years later.

Even once a writer is established, a classic author may serve as their mentor.

Above: American filmmaker / writer / actor / comedian / musician Woody Allen

“When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t there yet, I sometimes think:

“How would Dickens go at this sentence?

Above: English writer Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

How would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence?”

Above: Canadian-American writer Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005)

What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire.”

(Martin Amis)

Above: English writer Martin Amis (1949 – 2023)

You don’t have to limit yourself to the greats.

“Read, read, read.

Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.

Read!

You will absorb it.”

(William Faulkner)

Above: American writer William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

Make an appointment with yourself to read a book that is noted as a classic.

Revisit some of your favourites.

This time read it not only for enjoyment but to analyze what made the book so powerful for you.

What can you learn from that author’s methods that might help you make your own writing more vivid and influential?

For starters, consider:

• What is the story about, in a sentence or two?
• What is at stake for the protagonist?
• What does the story reveal about the characters, and how?
• How does the opening capture your interest?
• How do the action and the central conflict escalate?
• What are the story’s surprises?
• What emotions does it evoke in you? How does it do that?

The more active the reading the better.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.

The art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

The relation of writer and reader is successful only to the extent that they cooperate.

Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession.

The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

A piece of writing is a complex object.

The amount the reader catches will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved.

Your success in reading is determined by the extent to which you received everything the writer intended to communicate.

Either you understand perfectly the author has to say or you do not.

The goal a reader seeks – be it entertainment, information or understanding – determines the way he reads.

The effectiveness with which he reads is determined by the amount of effort and skill he puts into his reading.

The more effort the better.

There are four levels of reading:

1. Elementary reading

We recognize the individual words on the page.

What does the sentence say?

We seek to identify the actual words.

Only after recognizing them individually can we begin to try to understand them, to struggle with perceiving what they mean.

2. Inspectional Reading

The aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time.

Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

Your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you.

That is often a good deal.

What is the book about?

What is the structure of the book?

What are its parts?

What kind of book is it?

Most people are unaware of the value of inspectional reading.

They start a book on page 1 and plow steadily through it, without even reading the table of contents.

They are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial kowledge of the book at the same time that they are trying to understand it.

That compounds the difficulty.

3. Analytical reading

This is thorough reading, complete reading, good reading – the best reading you can do.

Analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.

The analytical reader must ask many and organized questions of what he is reading.

Analytical reading is always intensely active.

The reader grasps a book and works at it until the book becomes his own.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” (Francis Bacon)

Above: English philosopher / statesman Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)

Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

4. Syntopical reading

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all:

Comparative reading.

When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve.

With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

Therefore syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading, not an easy art, but the most rewarding of all reading activities.

We know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel.

That they enjoyed it is perfectly clear to them, but they cannot give much of an account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained that caused them pleasure.

A critical reading of anything depends upon the fullness of one’s apprehension.

Those who cannot say what they like about a novel probably have not read below its most obvious surfaces.

However, there is more to the paradox than that.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches.

It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know WHY one is pleased.

Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Expository books try to convey knowledge – knowledge about experiences that the reader has had or could have.

Imaginative books try to communicate an experience itself – one that the reader can have or share ONLY by reading – and if they succeed, they give the reader something to be enjoyed.

Because of their diverse intentions, the two sorts of work appeal differently to the intellect and the imagination.

We experience things through the exercise of our senses and imagination.

To know anything we must use our powers of judgment and reasoning, which are intellectual.

Fiction appeals primarily to the imagination.

Don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

When reading a story we must let it act on us.

We must allow it to move us.

We must let it do whatever work it wants to do on us.

We must make ourselves open to it.

The imaginative writer tries to maximize the latent ambiguities of words, in order thereby to gain all the richness and force that is inherent in their multiple meanings.

He uses metaphors as the units of his construction just as the logical writer uses words sharpened to a single meaning.

Imaginative writing must be read as having several distinct though related meanings.

Imaginative writing relies as much upon what is implied as upon what is said.

Don’t look for terms, propositions and arguments in imaginative literature.

We learn from experience – the experience that we have in the course of our daily lives.

So, too, we can learn from the vicariously, or artistically created, experiences that fiction produces in our imagination.

Imaginative books teach by creating experiences from which we can learn.

Don’t criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistently apply to communication of knowledge.

The “truth” of a good story is its versimilitude, its intrinsic probability or plausibility.

It must be a likely story, but it need not describe the facts of life or society in a manner that is verifiable by experiment or research.

“The standard of correctness is not the same in poetry as in politics.”

(Aristotle)

Above: Bust of Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

You must classify a work of imaginative literature according to its kind.

A lyric tells its story primarily in terms of a single emotional experience.

Novels and plays have much more complicated plots, involving many characters, their actions and their reactions upon one another as well as the emotions they suffer in the process.

A play differs from a novel by reason of the fact that it narrates entirely by means of actions and speeches.

The playwright can never speak in his own person, as the novelist can, and frequently does, in the course of a novel.

All of these differences in manner of writing call for differences in the reader’s receptivity.

Recognize the kind of fiction you are reading.

You must grasp the unity of the whole work.

Whether you have done this or not can be tested by whether you are able to express that unity in a sentence or two.

The unit of a story is always in the plot.

You have not grasped the whole story until you can summarize its plot in a brief narrative.

Plot is the soul of a story.

It is its life.

To read a story well you must have your finger on the pulse of the narrative.

Be sensitive to its very beat.

You must not only reduce the whole to its simplest unity, but you must also discover how that whole is constructed out of all its parts.

The parts are the various steps that the author takes to develop his plot – the details of characterization and incident.

Don’t criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience.

The good reader of a story does not question the world that the author creates:

The world that is re-created in himself.

“We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donné.

Our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”

(Henry James, The Art of Fiction)

Above: American – British author Henry James (1843 – 1916)

We must remember the obvious fact that we do not agree or disagree with fiction.

We either like it or we do not.

The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.

Before you express your likes and dislikes, you must first be sure that you have made an honest effort to appreciate the work.

By appreciation, we mean having the experience that the author tried to produce for you by working on your emotions and imagination.

You cannot appreciate a novel by reading it passively.

To achieve appreciation, as to achieve understanding, you must read actively.

First, read quickly and with total immersion.

Then practice…

What It Means to Read Like a Writer

1. Ask meaningful questions.

2. Articulate your opinions — and use evidence.

3. Annotate or keep a reading log.

4. Create something inspired by what you read.

5. Target specific writing skills you want to improve.

6. Examine the larger context.

7. Reread.

Above: Quotidian writer Diane Callahan

Part of a reader’s job is to find out why certain writers endure.

Writers learn to write by writing and by reading books.

Writers learn by reading the work of their predecessors.

And who could have asked for better teachers?

Generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal methodical way, the truth is that this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis.

In the ongoıng process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most love.

I read for pleasure, first.

Then I reread more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information conveyed, how the writer structured his plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.

Writing, like reading, is done one word at a time, putting every word on trial for its life.

Reading reveals wells of beauty and pleasure.

Writers learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.

Until you immerse yourself in a book, until you seek out what the writer is trying to say to you, then and only then can what they have written form the writer, the person, you will become.

Venerate the accomplishments of those who came before you.

Sweep the tombs of the past for the treasure of the tomes that form your present experience.

Above: Cemetery in Kavala, Greece

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell

• The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor

• The Independent Scholar’s Handbook, Ronald Gross

• Get Started in Creative Writing, Stephen May

• Your Creative Writing Masterclass, Jurgen Wolff

• How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

• “How to Read like a Writer“, Diane Callahan, http://www.YouTube.com

• Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose

• Plot and Structure, James Scott Bell

A man of letters

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Wednesday 3 April 2024

“What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft, a kind of breaking through to glory.“

(John Steinbeck)

Above: American writer John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)

“How can we live without our lives?

How will we know it’s us without our past?“

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)

“Waverly (his stepdaughter) came home (Salinas, California) yesterday and we had a pleasant homecoming party.

She was very tired so as usual Elaine (his wife) and I stayed up for her.

I guess we have no sense.

But in spite of that I am early this morning.

Feeling fine.

Sometimes I get a little panicky – so many things I do not do now that I am writing (on his novel East of Eden).

I put all the burdens on Elaine, of running the house and doing the many hundreds of things living entails.

So far, she hasn’t complained.

I help with what I can but I am very thoughtless – very.

My mind goes mooning away.

I never get very far from my book.

And this must get pretty tiresome.

I am sure that it does.

I guess a writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned.

And there is so much violence in me.

Sometimes I am horrified at the amount of it.

It isn’t very well concealed either.

It lies very close to the surface.“

(John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, 3 April 1951)

“He didn’t believe in psychiatrists, he said.

But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) has said that when his writing was blocked he would sit down and write a long letter to a friend whom he loved.

Above: American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

John Steinbeck, in writing East of Eden, unblocked himself for the daily stint ahead by writing a “letter” to his close friend and editor, Pascal Covici (1885 – 1964).

Above: Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor Pascal Covici (1885 – 1964)

It was written on the blue-rules pages of a large notebook, size 10 3/4″ X 14″, which Covici had supplied.

After the two opening letters, which filled the first few pages continuously, the letters appeared only on the left-hand pages.

On the right, when Steinbeck felt ready, he proceeded to the text of the novel.

He usually filled two pages of the text a day with a total of about 1,500 words.

Both the letter and text were written in black pencil in Steinbeck’s minute but clear longhand.

The writing covered the period from 29 January to 1 November 1951.

There was a letter for every working day until the first draft of the novel was finished.

The letter was primarily a method of warming up, flexing the author’s muscles both physical and mental.

He sometimes used it to adumbrate the problems and purposes of the passage he was about to embark: “a kind of arguing ground for the story“, as he says once.

If the argument had been worked out in his mind in advance, the material of the letter might consist of random thoughts, trial flights of wordsmanship, nuggets of information and comment for his friend about the surrounding events of the moment, both personal and public.

But the letters were also full of serious thinking about this novel, his longest and most ambitious, about novel writing in general, and about some of Steinbeck’s deepest convictions.

Not a formal act of literary creation for its own sake, this document casts a flood of light on the author’s mind and on the nature of the creative process.

“29 January 1951

Dear Pat:

How did time pass and how did it grow so late?

Have we learned anything from the passage of time?

Are we more mature, wiser, more perceptive, kinder?

We have known each other now for centuries and still I remember the first time and the last time.

We come now to the book.

It has been planned a long time.

I planned it when I didn’t know what it was about.“

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters continues Steinbeck’s working tradition of plucking out his self-awareness (he had volumes) and setting it aside so he could carry on the business of writing.

When he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck kept a personal journal.

Similarly, Steinbeck authorizes these letters to hold dominion over his progress.

The letters begin in confidence and strength but slowly reveal a man troubled.

At the end of February, a few days before his 49th birthday, he writes:

“This morning I am remiss.“

“February 23 [Friday]

This is a sad day at the beginning.

There is no telling what kind of day it will end up.

I can’t write down a sadness, although I know what it comes from.

It is Friday…“

And yet, unlike his experience with Grapes, Steinbeck retains self-control.

When flustered, he digs deeper into figures, dates, word counts and plans and, ultimately, carries on without floundering in the paranoia he experienced while writing Grapes.

Steinbeck wrote that his daily letters to Covici loosened his creative abilities.

Perhaps it was the passage of time and his experience.

Still, the difference between this experience and that a decade earlier was that he was writing to a friend rather than himself. 

(He was notoriously self-critical.)

“My nerves are very bad, awful in fact. I lust to get back into it.

Maybe I was silly to think I could write so long a book without stopping.

I can’t.

Or rather, couldn’t.

I’ll try to go on now.

Hope to lose some of the frantic quality in my mind now.”

(John Steinbeck: Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath)

Steinbeck positioned himself in what choreographer Twyla Tharp called a state of “being safe and secure” and what Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) called “a feeling of home“. 

Above: Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke

A position from which Tharp always worked, a position that evoked “mother“.

Above: American dancer / chereographer Twyla Tharp

In his first letter, Steinbeck writes:

“But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place — not very often and always unexplainable.

There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell.

This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.“

“Ideas are like rabbits.

You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.“

Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini

Creativity comes from a deeply vulnerable state, an openness to ideas, what Alan Lightman calls “divergent thinking“.

Above: American physicist / writer / social entrepreneur Alan Lightman

To achieve this, we must feel safe.

Rollo May’s Courage to Create, a ground-breaking study of fear and creativity, details the paradox of creative strength and personal vulnerability.

Above: American psychologist Rollo May (1909 – 1994)

“August 29 [Wednesday]

There’s a real feeling of finality in the air here.

We have two weeks and half more so it is not as near as I seem to indicate but the fall is surely coming.

And I have an autumn feeling in me.

This is one of the best feelings I know.

I have always loved the fall.

No reason.

It is filled with a warm sweet sadness which is a close relative to pleasure and not very far removed.“

Steinbeck lingers in this exceptional space, suffers, and more often than not, draws out greatness.

Above: John Steinbeck, 1962

“March 13, Tuesday

Things do happen and continue to happen on the outside.

Isn’t that odd that I now regard the book as the inside and the world as the outside.

And just as long as that is so the book is firm and the outside cannot hurt it or stop it.

And I must be sure that it remains that way by never letting time go by without working on it.

For it is one thing to have in one’s mind that the book will never be done and quite another to let it stop moving.“

In the draft dedication for East of Eden, Steinbeck recognized his friend’s critical role:

“The dedication is to you with all the admiration and affection that have been distilled from our singularly blessed association of many years.

This book is inscribed to you because you have been part of its birth and growth.”

Journal of a Novel is a wonderful companion to the East of Eden novel.

All of the notes are addressed to Pascal Covici, Steinbeck’s editor.

The author uses them in order to warm up for the day’s writing:

“You must think I waste an awful lot of time on these notes to you but actually it is the warm-up period.

It is the time of drawing thoughts together and I don’t resent it one bit.

I apparently have to dawdle a certain amount before I go to work.

Also if I keep the dawdling in this form I never leave my story.

If I wrote my dawdles some other way I would be thinking all over the map.”

It’s interesting to see ‘behind the curtain’ and read the mental struggles that he went through in the process of creating his book.

It seems that this is a shared experience:

“This is not a morning of great joy for some reason or other.

I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry.

And it does not seem to be me but the day itself.

It has a nature of its own quite separate from all other days.

Today is a dawdly day.

They seem to alternate.

I do a whole of a day’s work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle.

That’s today.

Went to bed early last night, read happily, slept happily.

Got up early and suddenly felt terrible — just terrible.

Fought that off and was drained dry.

Then I forced the work and it was as false and labored and foolish as anything I have ever seen.

I tried to kid myself that it only seemed bad but it really was bad.

So out it goes.

And what do you suppose could have caused it?

I just don’t know.”

“January 29, 1951

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much.

And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. 

A good writer always works at the impossible.“

“September 3, 1951

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world.

And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.“

He also procrastinates when he has a particularly difficult piece of writing coming up:

“I wish I knew how people do good and long-sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lives going — social, economic, etc.

I can’t.

I seem to have to waste time, so much dawdling to so much work.

I am frightened by this week before it even happens.

I feel just worthless today.

I have to drive myself.

I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness.

I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water.

Really childish.

I know that one of the reasons is that I dread the next scene, dread it like hell.”

It is interesting to read his thoughts on the structure and content of the book which ended up being quite different in the finished novel.

It boggles the mind how this was achieved during a time before word processors and the Internet, with precious handwritten pages being couriered from the author’s home to the publisher, and typed manuscript being reviewed and edited by hand.

East of Eden is long and it seems that Steinbeck knew this would be the case from the start.

He has a theory about the impact of long versus short books on the reader:

“Now — we must think of a book as a wedge driven into a man’s personal life.

A short book would be in and out quickly.

And it is possible for such a wedge to open the mind and do its work before it is withdrawn leaving quivering nerves and cut tissue.

A long book, on the other hand, drives in very slowly and if only in point of time remains for a while.

Instead of cutting and leaving, it allows the mind to rearrange itself to fit around the wedge.

Let’s carry the analogy a little farther.

When the quick wedge is withdrawn, the tendency of the mind is quickly to heal itself exactly as it was before the attack.

With the long book perhaps the healing has been warped around the shape of the wedge so that when the wedge is finally withdrawn and the book set down, the mind cannot ever be quite what it was before.

This is my theory and it may explain the greater importance of a long book.”

“June 28, 1951

I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. 

Above: Bust of Plato (427 – 348 BC), Capitoline Museum, Rome, Italy

Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. 

Above: Portrait of Lao Tzu (5th century BC), Zhang Lu, National Palace Museum, Beijing, China

It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. 

Above: Statue of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautma (563 – 400 BC), Sarnath Archaeological Museum, India

If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this:

Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.

Above: The Christ (4 BC to AD 30) Pantocrator, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt

And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know.

Above: Paul the Apostle (5 – 65), Peter Paul Rubens (1611)

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the Earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the Earth.”

Above: Vanity Piece, Hendrick Andriessen (1650), Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

It was while working on beet farms in the holidays that Steinbeck gained his first insights into the plight of migrant workers – a key theme in his social novels of the 1930s.

He was born into a middle class family in Monterey County, California, where his mother, a former teacher, fostered in him a love of books.

Above: 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the home where Steinbeck lived in his childhood

He dropped out of Stanford University after erratic studies in literature and biology, then headed to New York, where he worked in construction and as a reporter.

On his return to California, jobs on farms and in forests and fisheries helped to support his writing.

Above: State flag of California

His first three books sold poorly, but success eventually came in 1935 with Tortilla Flat, a story about wine-soaked Mexican-Spanish workers, inspired by the Arthurian legend of the Knights of the Round Table.

“In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme.

Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. 

There are shorter means, many of them.

There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. 

Try to understand each other.“

(Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men)

It was followed by Of Mice and Men, an unfolding tragedy of two migrant workers, the childlike giant, Lennie, and his protector, George.

“Ain’t many guys travel around together.

I don’t know why.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.“

“His ear heard more than is said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.“

“They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head.

An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it.

Just like heaven.

Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’.

I read plenty of books out here. 

Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.

It’s just in their head.”

(Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck)

“I must go over into the interior valleys.

There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. 

The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget.

In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week.

I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.

Do you know what they’re afraid of?

They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer.

The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders.

But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them.

The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering.

I’ll do what I can.

Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.“

(Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch)

“For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.“

(Journal entry (11 June 1938), Working Days : The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath )

A storm broke over his epic work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), hammered out over five months after Steinbeck travelled with the Okies – desperate migrant farmers escaping to California from the Dust Bowl.

After the financial crash of 1929, the US fell into a severe economic depression.

By the mid-1930s, 25% of the population was unemployed.

Crop prices fell by 60% and a combination of overfarming, soil erosion and drought refuced the fertile Great Plains to a dust bowl.

Thousands of smallholders had their homes and plots seized by landowners and banks.

They then migrated west, lured by the promise of work and sustenance on the farms in California’s land of plenty, only to face animosity and rejection when they arrived.

Above: An impoverished American family living in a shanty, Dorthea Lange, 1936

Biblical in tone, Steinbeck’s novel was rooted in the homespun details of the lives of the Joad family.

“I tried to write this book the way lives are being written.“

Above: Migrant Mother, 1936, Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph of Florence Owens Thompson 

“Boileau said that kings, gods and heroes only were fit subjects for literature.

The writer can only write about what he admires. 

Above: French poet / critic Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux (1636 – 1711)

Present-day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.

And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it.

He finds it in the struggling poor now.“

(Radio interview (1939) quoted in the Introduction to a 1992 edition of The Grapes of Wrath)

At its peak the Grapes of Wrath sold 10,000 copies a week.

It earned a Pulitzer Prize, but there was a backlash against his indictment of the American Dream.

He escaped to the Sea of Cortez to collect marine specimens with his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts.

Above: American marine biologist Ed Ricketts (1897 – 1948)

“Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it.

That our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region.

We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.”

And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. 

We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world.

And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool.

Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region.

That isn’t very important in the world.

And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. 

None of it is important or all of it is.“

“We are no better than the animals.

In fact, in a lot of ways, we aren’t as good.“

(John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951)

During WW2, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.

Above: Masthead of the New York Herald Tribune (1924 – 1966)

During this period, he wrote The Moon is Down (1942), an exploration of the effects of war and occupation on a once peaceable village (a thinly veiled examination of the Nazi occupation of Norway).

Now a settled New York resident, Steinbeck returned to his roots with Cannery Row (1944), based in the sardine-packing district of Monterey, and the epic East of Eden (1952), for which he drew upon his own family history in Salinas.

“For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more.

And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.”

(John Steinbeck, The Pearl, 1947)

In the 1960s, he lost credibility as a liberal voice because of his support for the Vıetnam War – both of his sons by his second marriage were army recruits.

Above: Soldiers of the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) 1st Batallion, 6th Regiment, are airlifted to “Landing Zone Kala” northeast of Khâm Đức, Vietnam, by US Army UH-1H Hueys during Operation Elk Canyon, 12 July 1970.

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which is a penetrating study of moral degeneration in the US, was a return to form that contributed to Steinbeck’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

“No man really knows about other human beings.

The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.“

“What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.“

“To be alive at all is to have scars.“

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a 1962 travelogue which depicts a 1960 road trip around the United States made by Steinbeck, in the company of his standard poodle Charley.

Steinbeck wrote that he was moved by a desire to see his country because he made his living writing about it.

He wrote of having many questions going into his journey, the main one being:

“What are Americans like today?”

However, he found that he had concerns about much of the “new America” he saw.

Steinbeck tells of traveling throughout the United States in a specially made camper he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse.

His travels start in Long Island, New York, and roughly follow the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in Califronia across to Texas, through the Deep South, and then back to New York.

Such a trip encompassed nearly 10,000 miles.

According to Thom Steinbeck, the author’s oldest son, the reason for the trip was that Steinbeck knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time.

The younger Steinbeck has said he was surprised that his stepmother allowed his father to make the trip;

His heart condition meant he could have died at any time. 

A new introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book cautioned readers that:

“It would be a mistake to take this travelogue too literally, as Steinbeck was at heart a novelist.“

The author died in December 1968, having written nearly 30 books.

“How do I find time to write?“

Steinbeck averaged 1,500 words a day and this was after he wrote his letter to Pascal moulding his thoughts into the text he wished to create.

Only you can answer that question, but, if you want to be a successful writer, you have just got to find or make time.

Prioritıze your activities.

The real writer cannot not write.

The real writer makes time to write.

You will know your own circumstances.

Try to set aside a regular period each day for writing.

If you only manage to write 300 words each day, you will complete the first draft of a good-sized 100,000-word novel in a year or a couple of short stories per month or one article a week or one blogpost a day.

Make your mind up.

As you have read, Steinbeck was not only born to be a writer, he made himself into a writer.

Perhaps you too have it in you to emulate Steinbeck.

Above: John Steinbeck

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Wikiquote

• Google Photos

• The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor

• “Journal of a Novel“, Andrew Doran, http://www.andrewdoran.uk

• “Journal of a Novel“, Ellen Vrana, https://www.theexaminedlife.org

• John Steinbeck : A Biography, Jay Parini

• Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, John Steinbeck

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck

• Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck

• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

• Conversations with John Steinbeck, edited by Thomas Fensch

• Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

• The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck

• The Pearl, John Steinbeck

• The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck

• Writers’ Questions and Answers, Gordon Wells (Alison & Busby)

• Writers: Their Lives and Works (DK Penguin Random House)

Across the purple hill

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Tuesday 2 April 2024

“A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define words like ‘therefore’, ‘else’, ‘other’ ‘also’, ‘thereof’, ‘therefore’, ‘instead’, ‘otherwise’, ‘despite’, ‘already’ and ‘not yet’.”

(Carol Shields, Unless)

Today is International Children’s Book Day (ICBD), an annual event sponsored by the Intenrational Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), an international non-profit organization.

Founded in 1967, the day is observed on or around Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, April 2. 

Activities include writing competitions, announcements of book awards and events with authors of children’s literature.

Each year a different National Section of IBBY has the opportunity to be the international sponsor of ICBD.

It decides upon a theme and invites a prominent author from the host country to write a message to the children of the world and a well-known illustrator to design a poster.

These materials are used in different ways to promote books and reading.

Many IBBY Sections promote ICBD through the media and organize activities in schools and public libraries.

Often ICBD is linked to celebrations around children’s books and other special events that may include encounters with authors and illustrators, writing competitions or announcements of book awards.

International Children’s Book Day (ICBD) is celebrated annually on April 2 to promote reading and to inspire a love for books among children worldwide.

Every year, the International Children’s Book Day (ICBD) is celebrated in honour of the Danish author Hans Christian Anderson.

The aim of the day is to encourage children’s love of reading through the use of books.

Each year, the International Bureau of Children’s Books (IBBY) chooses a new department to be the international sponsor of ICBD.

The IBBY selects a theme and asks a well-known writer from the host nation to pen a letter to young readers everywhere.

This message is then accompanied by an illustration by a renowned illustrator on a poster.

Many strategies are used to promote books and reading with the resources produced by IBBY. 

IBBY Japan (JBBY) is honoured to be the official sponsor of ICBD 2024, under the theme “Cross the Seas on the Wing of your Imagination“.

Well-known Japanese writer and 2018 HC Andersen Award recipient Eiko Kadono wrote a letter to all children worldwide.

The poster was made by Japanese artist Nana Furiya, who resides in Slovakia and has an international outlook.

The keyword for ICBD 2024 is imagination.

JBBY believes that fostering imagination will lead to mutual understanding and a spirit of tolerance.

Above: Eiko Kadono

ICBD was initiated by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), a non-profit organization founded in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1953.

The organization aims to promote international understanding through children’s books, as well as to advocate for children’s right to access quality literature.

The idea for International Children’s Book Day was proposed by Jella Lepman, a German writer and journalist, who founded the International Youth Library in Munich in 1949.

Lepman strongly believed in the power of children’s literature to foster empathy, understanding, and cultural exchange, especially in the aftermath of World War II.

Above: Jella Lepman and children

Above: Memorial plaque for Jella Lepman at the international youth library in Blutenburg Castle, Bavaria (Bayern), Germany (Deutschland)

The first International Children’s Book Day was celebrated on 2 April 1967, coinciding with Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, the renowned Danish author best known for his fairy tales.

Andersen’s works have had a profound influence on children’s literature worldwide, making his birthday a fitting date to celebrate children’s books.

International Children’s Book Day is important because it encourages children around the world to read for pleasure and to become more literate.

This annual event, organised by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), celebrates children’s literature and the continuing legacy of authors such as Hans Christian Andersen.

Through books, children are given the opportunity to discover many points of view, spark their imagination and develop a lifelong love of reading, helping to create a brighter future through the power of storytelling.

“Oh, grown-ups cannot understand

And grown-ups never will,

How short’s the way to fairy land

Across the purple hill”

(Alfred Noyes)

Above: English poet Alfred Noyes (1880 – 1958)

Hans Christian Andersen (2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author.

Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales.

Andersen’s fairy tales, consisting of 156 stories across nine volumes,^[1] have been translated into more than 125 languages.

They have become embedded in Western collective consciousness, accessible to children as well as presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers. 

His most famous fairy tales include:

• “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
• “The Little Mermaid”
• “The Nightingale“
• “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”
• “The Red Shoes”
• “The Princess and the Pea”
• “The Snow Queen”
• “The Ugly Duckling”
• “The Little Match Girl”
• “Thumbelina“

His stories have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films.

Above: Hans Christian Andersen (1869)

Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark (Danish: Danmark) on 2 April 1805.

Andersen was baptized on 15 April 1805 in Saint Hans Church in Odense.

When the new-born child was taken to the church to be baptised, it cried resoundingly, which greatly displeased the ill-tempered pastor, who declared, in his passion, that “the thing cried like a cat”, at which his mother was bitterly annoyed .

One of the godparents, however, consoled her by the assurance, that the louder the child cried, the sweeter he would sing some day, and that pacified her.

Above: Sankt Hans Kirke, Odense, Danmark

The father of Andersen was not without education.

The mother was all heart.

The married couple lived on the best terms with each other.

Yet the husband did not feel himself happy.

He had no discourse with his neighbours, but preferred keeping himself at home, where he read Holberg’s Comedies, The Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights, and worked at a puppet theatre for his little son, whom on Sundays he often took with him to the neighbouring woods, where the two commonly spent the whole day in quiet solitude with each other.

Andersen’s father, who had received an elementary school education, introduced his son to literature, reading him Arabian Nights. 

Andersen’s mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman.

Following her husband’s death in 1816, she remarried in 1818.

Above: Andersen’s childhood home, Odense, Danmark 

Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and had to support himself, working as an apprentice to a weaver and, later, to a tailor.

At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor.

Above: Copenhagen, Danmark

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
‘Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea
Once I sailed away
But I’m home today
Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful
Copenhagen for me
I sailed up the Skagerrak
And sailed down the Kattegat
Through the harbor and up to the quay
And there she stands waiting for me
With a welcome so warm and so gay
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
‘Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea
Once I sailed away
But I’m home today
Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful
Copenhagen for me

Danny Kaye, Hans Christian Andersen, 1952

Having a good soprano voice, Andersen was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed.

A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet, and taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.

Above: Det Kongelige Teater, Copenhagen, Danmark

Jonas Collin (1776 – 1861), director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI (1768 – 1839) to pay part of his education. 

Above: Danish patron of the arts Jonas Collins

Above: Danish King Frederick VI

Andersen had by then published his first story, “The Ghost at Palnatoke’s Grave” (1822).

Though not a stellar pupil, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.

He later said that his years at this school were the darkest and most bitter years of his life.

At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster’s home.

There he was abused and was told that it was done in order “to improve his character“.

He later said that the faculty had discouraged him from writing, which resulted in a depression.

Above: Helsinger (English: Elsinore), Danmark

A very early fairy tale by Andersen, “The Tallow Candle” (Danish: Tællelyset), was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012.

The story, written in the 1820s, is about a candle that does not feel appreciated.

A tallow candle, whose parents are a sheep and a melting pot, becomes more and more disheartened as it cannot find a purpose in life.

It meets a tinderbox who lights a flame on the candle, so it finally finds its right place in life and spreads joy and happiness for itself and its fellow creatures.

It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to one of his benefactors.

The story remained in that family’s possession until it was found among other family papers in a local archive.

In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story “A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager” (Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene).

Its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat.

A crucial factor which enhanced and secured Andersen’s international fame, was his eagerness for lengthy sojourns both at home and abroad.

Through his frequent and extensive travels, Andersen was able to cross and transgress spatial, temporal and social borders and expand his international social network far beyond his home country.

Maybe even more important is the fact that Andersen thereby experienced the profound dynamics of spatial and temporal change, which made him aware of the two fundamentally opposed approaches to travel he himself embodied:

On the one hand he represented the quintessential 19th century bourgeois traveller, conducting his
educational Grand Tour, while he on the other hand, as a result of his personal life journey
so to say, was inescapably connected to its opposite:

The underlying social image of the tramp, the social misfit who rejects everything a contemporary upper-class traveler in those days wanted to be.

The gentleman traveler Andersen was doomed to be accompanied by his crude lower-class shadow, although he finally not only became a celebrity, but even a prestigious national literary icon of exceptional proportions.

More importantly, also in his literary work Andersen’s notion of mobility oscillates
between these two extreme positions, one emanating from his motivation to climb the social
ladder, while the other is fueled by his assiduous awareness of his modest social background.

For Andersen, his humble origin was a lifelong touchstone for everything he undertook, a
fundamental point of reference in his travels into the unknown, both geographically as well
as socially speaking.

In short:

Andersen’s mobility was clearly motivated by his longing for social advancement, with a clear awareness of the distance already covered.

One of the reasons to engage with this particular work, is the fact that it contains some of the earliest examples of what later was to become the essence of Andersen’s oeuvre:

The juxtaposition of the real and the imaginary.

Another reason why is the fact that Fodreise draws attention to one particular – historically
defined – form of locomotion, i.e. travel on foot.

Unlike what one might expect, walking – especially in the early 1800s – is not merely an expression of the natural human ability to move on foot but walking rather is a culturally and historically determined signifier, both in Andersen, as in more general terms.

It is an extremely playful, arabesque and grotesque quasi-travel account of a surprisingly short walk during the last hours of New Year’s Eve 1828 and the initial hours of New Year’s Day 1829.

Thus, the extensive title, feigning that the text deals with some sort of lengthy expedition on foot into some kind ofuncharted territory, plays an ironic and entertaining game with the reader’s expectation, because anyone who is just faintly familiar with the geography of Copenhagen knows that the distance between Holmen’s Canal and the East point of the island of Amager can be covered in less than an hour – even on foot.

Above: Holmens Kanal, Johannes Rach and Hans Heinrich Eegberg, 1750

Andersen does not really make use of the cityscape as a motif, but rather utilizes the city as a realist launchpad for his otherwise unbridled fantasy.

Although various localities in the urban topography are easily recognizable in Fodreise, they are functioning as a mere backdrop for Andersen’s unrestrained fantasies.

The fact that Andersen’s book – judging from its actual title – is about a walk or journey on foot seems to
downplay or degrade its importance.

The inconspicuous activity of walking sends a warning signal to readers not to expect too much from it, because isn’t walking a bit nutty and an utterly ordinary and totally unspectacular activity, that tends to be overlooked?

This negative framing of walking does not only pertain to Andersen’s contemporary readership, but also
to later generations and even today pedestrians are often marginalized by city planners, motorists and traffic analysts.

Instead of a voyage or a Grand Tour of some kind, Fodreise deals with a detour, merely a stroll, a short, nonsensical walk, and one may well ask what it is that makes this miniature ‘enterprise’ so special, that an entire book length travelogue was devoted to it.

Fodreise commences on New Year’s Eve 1828 with a Faustian scene in which the first person narrator is visited by the Devil himself, who conveys the ‘sinful’ idea of becoming an author to him.

Satan’s underlying purpose with this strategy is that the world, in the end, will be flooded with bad literati, who ultimately will corrupt and undermine the world with their crappy work.

Bad literature, whatever that may be, would ultimately eradicate humanity and enslave people under the rule of evil.

But instead of rejecting the Devil’s encouragement, Andersen’s protagonist cannot resist the temptation, leaves his cozy room, rushes down the stairs and is out in the street in a jiffy.

After a few steps, he meets a couple of ladies who force him to choose between the two of them.

One is an attractive, down-to-earth woman offering him carnal love, while the other is a melodramatic apparition of a languishing girl, representing literature or “den lyriske Muse” (the Muse of poetry) as
she calls herself.

And from then on, the story is a roller coaster of supernatural, grotesque events, a fantastic mixture of improbable and impossible actions and encounters.

Instead of walking straight towards a clearly defined goal, the narrator, as soon as he has left his home, is tossed around, thrown out of orbit, slowed down by a series of Kafkaesque encounters and random choices turning the road into a chaotic spatial and temporal labyrinth.

In the end, the narrator does reach a kind of destination, but when he finally wishes to step on board a boat that will ferry him across the Sound to Sweden, and thus beyond the frame defied by the title, he is denied access, because this would be a subversion of themeaning of the title, Fodreise, which is still a journey conducted on foot, and not a seaborne ‘voyage’ to another country.

So, when he is finally standing on the shore of Amager, the narrator has no other option than to stick to his word, stay in Denmark and try to settle his debt to Satan and write a lousy book.

The question then is whether he has become one of the many inferior authors who flood the world with their insignificant or at best mediocre works that ultimately will corrupt and undermine humanity, or is he able to make it to the top and produce canonical works of lasting value and thereby save humankind?

In any event, once he has reached the shore of Amager, his final destination, the narrator is drained for words and imagination and, as the final wordless chapter clearly shows, now it is up to the readers and critics to give their verdict.

Above: Satellite image of Amager Island

Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St.Nicholas Church Tower, and a short volume of poems.

Above: Kunsthallen Nikolaj, the former Sankt Nikolaj Kirke, Copenhagen, Danmark

He made little progress in writing and publishing immediately following these poems, but did receive a small travel grant from the King in 1833.

This enabled him to set out on the first of many journeys throughout Europe.

At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, Andersen wrote the story “Agnete and the Merman“.

Above: Le Locle, Canton Jura, Switzerland (French: Suisse)

“There is an old Danish folks-song of Agnete and the Merman, which bore an affinity to my own state of mind, and to the treatment of which I felt an inward impulse.

The song tells that Agnete wandered solitarily along the shore, when a merman rose up from the waves and decoyed her by his speeches.

She followed him to the bottom of the sea, remained there seven years, and bore him seven children.

One day, as she sat by the cradle, she heard the church bells sounding down to her in the depths of the sea, and a longing seized her heart to go to church.

By her prayers and tears she induced the merman to conduct her to the upper world again, promising soon to return.

He prayed her not to forget his children, more especially the little one in the cradle, stopped up her ears and her mouth, and then led her upwards to the seashore.

When, however, she entered the church, all the holy images, as soon as they saw her, a daughter of sin and from the depths of the sea, turned themselves round to the walls.

She was affrighted, and would not return, although the little ones in her home below were weeping.

I treated this subject freely, in a lyrical and dramatic manner.

I will venture to say that the whole grew out of my heart.

All the recollections of our beechwoods and the open sea were blended in it.

In the midst of the excitement of Paris I lived in the spirit of the Danish folk songs.

It is a weakness of my country-people, that commonly, when abroad, during their residence in large cities, they almost live exclusively in company together.

They must dine together, meet at the theatre, and see all the lions of the place in company.

Letters are read by each other.

News of home is received and talked over, and at last they hardly know whether they are in a foreign land or their own.

I had given way to the same weakness in Paris, and in leaving it, therefore, determined for one month to board myself in some quiet place in Switzerland, and live only among the French, so as to be compelled to speak their language, which was necessary to me in the highest degree.

Above: Paris, France

In the little city of Lodi, in a valley of the Jura mountains, where the snow fell in August, and the clouds floated below us, was I received by the amiable family of a wealthy watchmaker.

They would not hear a word about payment.

I lived among them and their friends as a relation, and when we parted the children wept.

We had become friends, although I could not understand their patois.

They shouted loudly into my ear, because they fancied I must be deaf, as I could not understand them.

In the evenings, in that elevated region, there was a repose and a stillness in nature, and the sound of the evening bells ascended to us from the French frontier.

At some distance from the city, stood a solitary house, painted white and clean.

On descending through two cellars, the noise of a millwheel was heard, and the rushing waters of a river which flowed on here, hidden from the world.

I often visited this place in my solitary rambles.

Here I finished my poem of “Agnete and the Merman,” which I had begun in Paris.“

The same year he spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante, which inspired the title of “The Bay of Fables“.

Above: Sestri Levante, Italy (Italian: Italia)

Above: The Bay of Fables and Silence (La Baia della Favole e del Silenzio), Sestri Levante, Italia

He arrived in Rome (Roma) in October 1834.

Above: Roma, Italia

Andersen’s travels in Italy were reflected in his first novel, a fictionalized autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren), published in 1835 to instant acclaim.

The story, reflecting Andersen’s own travels in Italy in 1833, reveals much about his own life and aspirations as experienced by Antonio, the novel’s principal character.

In this fictionalized autobiography, the hero Antonio does not arrive as a tourist but grows up in Italy, thus able to show not just the sunny side of life but also some of its shadows.

In its structure, the novel reflects Andersen’s own life and his travels through Italy.

The descriptions of the Italian towns and regions are particularly captivating, expressed in the author’s colourful language. 

Like Andersen himself, Antonio comes from a poor background but fights his way through various crises and amorous relationships until he is finally successful.

The last improvisation involves a fishing boat accident in which many lose their lives.

But finally Antonio becomes the happy husband of the beautiful young Lara as well as a landowner in Calabria.

Hans Christian Andersen is one of those men who, from their earliest youth, have had to keep up a warfare with circumstances – a man who seemed destined by Fate to end their lives unnoticed in a village, and yet through an instinctive sense of their destined pre-eminence in the beautiful regions of art and literature, and sustained by an irrepressible will, have made themselves a part of the great world.

Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. (Eventyr, fortalt for Børn. Første Samling.) is a collection of nine fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.

The tales were published in a series of three installments by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen between May 1835 and April 1837.

They were Andersen’s first venture into the fairy tale genre.

The first installment was a volume of 61 unbound pages published 8 May 1835 containing “The Tinderbox“, “Little Claus and Big Claus”, “The Princess and the Pea” and “Little Ida’s Flowers“.

The first three tales were based on folktales Andersen had heard in his childhood.

The fourth was Andersen’s creation for Ida Thiele, the daughter of folklorist Just Mathias Thiele (1795 – 1874), Andersen’s early benefactor.

Above: Just Mathias Thiele

Reitzel paid Andersen 30 rigsdalers for the manuscript.

The booklet was priced at 24 shillings.

The second booklet was published on 16 December 1835 and contained “Thumbelina“, “The Naughty Boy“, and “The Travelling Companion“.

“Thumbelina” was inspired by “Tom Thumb” and other stories of miniature people.

“The Naughty Boy” was based on a poem about Eros from the Anacreontea.

“The Travelling Companion” was a ghost story Andersen had experimented with in the year 1830.

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing
Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing
Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?
When your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall

Though you’re no bigger than my thumb (than my thumb)
Than my thumb (than my thumb), than my thumb (than my thumb)
Sweet Thumbelina, don’t be glum (don’t be glum)
Now now now, hee hee hee, come come come

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing
Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing
Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?
When your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall

Though you’re no bigger than my toe (than my toe)
Than my toe (than my toe), than my toe (than my toe)
Sweet Thumbelina, keep that glow (keep that glow)
And you’ll grow, and you’ll grow, and you’ll grow, whoooa!

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing
Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing
Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?
When your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall

Above: Danny Kaye, Hans Christian Andersen, 1952

The third booklet contained “The Little Mermaid” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes“.

It was published on 7 April 1837.

“The Little Mermaid” was influenced by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine” (1811) and legends about mermaids.

This tale established Andersen’s international reputation. 

Above: The Little Mermaid statue, Copenhagen, Danmark

The only other tale in the third booklet was “The Emperor’s New Clothes“, which was based on a medieval Spanish story with Arab and Jewish origins.

On the eve of the third installment’s publication, Andersen revised the conclusion (in which the Emperor simply walks in procession) to its now-famous finale of a child calling out:

“The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!“

This is the story of the King’s new clothes
Now there was once a King who was absolutely insane about new clothes
And one day two swindlers came to sell him what they said was a magic suit of clothes.
Now they held up this particular garment and they said ‘Your majesty this is a magic suit’.
Well the truth in the matter is there was no suit there at all.
But the swindlers were very smart and they said
‘Your majesty to a wise man this is a beautiful raymond but to a fool it is absolutely invisible.
Well naturally the King not wanting to appear a fool said.
‘Isn’t it grand, isn’t it fine, look at the cut, the style, the line.

The suit of clothes is all together
But all together, it’s altogether, the most remarkable suit of clothes that I have ever seen
These eyes of mine have once determined the sleeves are velvet
The cape is zurman, the holes are blue, and the doublet is a lovely shade of green.
(Lovely shade of green)
Somebody send for the Queen

Well they sent for the Queen and they quickly explained to her about the magic suit of clothes
Well naturally the Queen not wanting to appear a fool said
“Well isn’t it awe, isn’t it rich, look at the charm and then the stitch”

The suit of clothes is altogether but all together it’s altogether
The most remarkable suit of clothes that I have ever seen
These eyes of mine have once determined the sleeves are velvet
The cape is zurman, the holes are blue, and the doublet is a lovely shade of green.
(Lovely shade of green)

Summon the court to convene
Well the court convened and you never in your life saw as many people as were at that court
All the ambassadors, the dukes, the earls, the counts
It was just blanketed with people
And they were all told about the magic suit of clothes
And after they were told they naturally didn’t want to appear fools
And they said
Isn’t ooh, isn’t it aah, Isn’t it absolutely (whistle)
The suit of clothes is altogether, but all together, it’s altogether
The most remarkable suit of clothes a tailor ever made
Now quickly put it all together
With gloves of leather and hat and feather
It’s altogether the thing to wear on Saturday’s parade
(Saturday’s parade)
Leading the royal brigade

Now Saturday came and the streets were just lined
With thousands and thousands and thousands of people
And they all were cheering as the artillery came by
The infantry marched by
The cavalry galloped by
And everybody was cheering like mad
Except one little boy

You see
He hadn’t heard about the magic suit
And didn’t know what he was supposed to see
Well as the King came by the little boy looked
And horrified said

“Look at the King, look at the King, look at the King, the King, the King”
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether, he’s altogether
As naked as the day that he was born
The king is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether, he’s altogether
The very least the King has ever worn
(Call the court physician, call an intermission)
His Majesty is wide open to ridicule and scorn
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether, he’s altogether
As naked as the day that he was born

Above: Danny Kaye, Hans Christian Andersen, 1952

Danish reviews of the first two booklets first appeared in 1836.

They were not enthusiastic.

The critics disliked the chatty, informal style and apparent immorality, since children’s literature was meant to educate rather than to amuse.

The critics discouraged Andersen from pursuing this type of style.

Andersen believed that he was working against the critics’ preconceived notions about fairy tales.

Above: The flag of Denmark

He temporarily returned to novel-writing, waiting a full year before publishing his third installment.

The nine tales from the three booklets were published in one volume and sold for 72 shillings.

A title page, a table of contents, and a preface by Andersen were published in this volume.

In 1868, Horace Scudder (1838 – 1902), the editor of Riverside Magazine for Young People, offered Andersen $500 for 12 new stories.

Sixteen of Andersen’s stories were published in the magazine.

Ten of them appeared there before they were printed in Denmark.

Above: American man of letters Horace Scudder

In 1851, he published In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches.

The publication received wide acclaim.

“I felt, what since then has become an acknowledged fact, that travelling would be the best school for me.

“Now be happy,” said my friends, “make yourself aware of your unbounded good fortune!

Enjoy the present moment, as it will probably be the only time in which you will get abroad.

You shall hear what people say about you while you are travelling, and how we shall defend you; sometimes, however, we shall not be able to do that.”

A keen traveller, Andersen published several other long travelogues: 

• Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz: A Report of a Trip to Saxon Switzerland (1831)

• A Poet’s Bazaar: Pictures of Travels in Germany, Italy, Greece and the Orient (1871)

• In Spain and A Visit to Portugal (1866).

(The last one describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and José O’Neill, who he knew in the mid-1820s while he was living in Copenhagen.)

In his travelogues, Andersen used contemporary conventions related to travel writing but developed the style to make it his own.

Each of his travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of his experiences, adding additional philosophical passages on topics such as authorship, immortality and fiction in literary travel reports.

Some of the travelogues, such as Pictures of Sweden, contain fairy tales.

Above: Flag of Sweden

In the 1840s, Andersen’s attention returned to the theatre stage, but with little success.

He had better luck with the publication of the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840).

He started a second series of fairy tales in 1838 and a third series in 1845.

At this point Andersen was celebrated throughout Europe, although his native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions.

Between 1845 and 1864, Andersen lived at Nyhavn 67, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque is now placed.

Patrons of Andersen’s writings included the monarchy of Denmark, the House of Schleswig – Holstein – Sonderburg – Glücksburg.

An unexpected invitation from King Christian IX (1818 – 1906)  to the Royal Palace entrenched Andersen’s folklore in Danish royalty as well as making its way to the Romanov dynasty when Christian IX’s daughter Maria Feodorovna (1847 – 1928) married Alexander III of Russia (1845 – 1894).

Above: Hans Christian Andersen statue in Kongens Have, Copenhagen, Denmark

In “Andersen as a Novelist“, Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) remarks that Andersen is characterized as “a possibility of a personality, wrapped up in such a web of arbitrary moods and moving through an elegiac duo-decimal scaled of almost echoless, dying tones just as easily roused as subdued, who, in order to become a personality, needs a strong life-development“.

Above: Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

In June 1847, Andersen visited England for the first time, enjoying triumphant social success.

The Countess of Blessington (1789 – 1849) invited him to her parties where many intellectuals would meet, and at one such party he met Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) for the first time.

They shook hands and walked to the veranda, which Andersen noted in his diary:

“We were on the veranda, and I was so happy to see and speak to England’s now-living writer whom I do love the most.”

The two authors respected each other’s work and as writers, and had in common their depictions of the underclass who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty.

Above: English writer Charles Dickens

Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to meet Dickens.

He extended the planned brief visit to Dickens’ home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, much to the distress of Dickens’ family.

After Andersen was told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence between them, to Andersen’s great disappointment and confusion.

He had enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered.

Above: Gads Hill Place, Rochester, England

It is suspected that Dickens modeled the physical appearance and mannerisms of Uriah Heep from David Copperfield after Andersen.

Wikipedia then goes on to discuss Andersen’s romantic past.

Frankly, this is something I don’t really need to know.

Was Andersen heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual or involuntarily celibate?

Does the answer enhance or detract from the quality of his character and the writing he produced?

I believe this does not matter.

What interests me about Andersen is how he wrote unforgettable stories and inspirational travelogues.

The rest is just noise to me.

Above: Hans Christian Andersen (1836)

As well I feel the topic of Andersen’s intimate life diminishes the magic of his tales for children.

In early 1872, at age 67, Andersen fell out of his bed and was severely hurt.

He never fully recovered from the resultant injuries.

Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.

He died on 4 August 1875, in a country house called Rolighed (literally: calmness) near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends, the banker Moritz G. Melchior (1816 – 1884) and his wife.

Shortly before his death, Andersen consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying:

“Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps.“

At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered.

The Danish government paid him an annual stipend for being a “national treasure“.

Above: Rolighed, Osterbro, Copenhagen, Danmark

Above: Burial site of Hans Christian Andersen, Assistens Cemetery, Copenhagen

What interests me are the places Andersen went and the works he produced.

How did he derive inspiration from the things he saw?

How did he create great stories?

Above: Hans Christian Andersen and the ugly duckling, Central Park, New York City

I know that storytelling comes naturally to human beings.

That is why stories are all around us.

When you talk to your friends, you tell stories.

When you watch movies and read books, you are watching and reading stories.

When you study history and current events, you are understanding the world through stories.

You have stories to tell and whether you consider yourself a storyteller or not, you already tell them.

By learning how to tell a story, you can become a stronger communicator and even a better writer in other area, like academic and professional writing.

What is a story?

A story is, essentially, an account of connected events.

These events can be mentioned explicitly or implied.

Take a look at this famous six-word story that is often attributed incorrectly to Ernest Hemingway:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Above: American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

There is a lot you might infer from this sentence.

From the story’s scant clues, you might form ideas about who is offering the shoes, why they were never worn and why the seller is seeking payment for them rather than passing them along for free.

As you make these inferences, you are putting together a story.

An account of events is not always a story.

To be a story, the following elements must be present:

• setting
• plot
• conflict
• character
• theme

How to write a story in five steps:

1. Find inspiration
2. Brainstorm
3. Outline
4. Write the first draft
5. Revise and edit your story

My novel (The Donkey Trail) and my colloborative project with former Olympic calibre athlete Steve O’Brien (Highway One) are frame stories – multiple shorter stories that fit into a larger framework.

Andersen was a master at both short stories and frame stories (his stories told within travelogues).

My colleague, Melek, originally assigned to teach an intermediate level Creative Writing found off the Internet a short story table involving objects, themes and characters.

How would you combine: (object / theme / character)

• a rocking horse, a fear of cats and an adventurous chıld?
• a secret garden, a surprise meeting and a famous celebrity?
• an unopened drawer, a fear of the dark and a curious teenager?
• an old notebook, a beautıful moment and a naughty child?
• an English dictionary, a beautiful gesture and an extended family member?
• a poisonous drink, a busy morning and a slow waitress?

How would Andersen make stories from these?

Take my present dilemmas with Highway One:

How can I combine Steve’s first day on his Trans-Canada Tour with his mention of Terry Fox (maybe I could compare their individual moments?) with:

Above: Canadian athlete / humanitarian Steve O’Brien

Above: Canadian athlete / humanitarian Terry Fox (1958 – 1981)

• Victoria-born artist Emily Carr (1871 – 1945), with excerpts from her memoir Klee Wyck?

Above: Emily Carr, Kitwancool, 1928

• Victoria-died writer Carol Shields (1935 – 2003)
  • (Excerpts from The Stone Diaries, with the theme of a chapter detailing an epoch in the life of a person?
  • Or from Larry’s Party, where we consider mazes and choices we make in trying to navigate them?
  • Or from Unless – a linear series of reflections?)

The journey – both biographically and geographically that led Steve to decide to do his Trans-Canada Tour, starting from Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway, to raise awareness of the difficulties in the development of children and youth- and his challenging first day as a man in motion with and without man-powered methods:

Above: Mile Zero, Trans-Canada Highway, Victoria, British Columbia

How can I incorporate all the aforementioned elements together?

Should I even try?

Take my present challenge with The Donkey Trail:

As I describe the married couple’s journey to the Donkey Trail, how much description of the places they pass through do I mention and still make these asides importance influences on the story?

Do I mention the murder on the mountain that they can see from the window of their apartment?

Part of me thinks I should, for the sense of difficult problems that must be ascended, the risk of relationships between people, the bond between man and wife are both part of The Donkey Trail plot and of the murders on Mount Säntis.

Part of me thinks I shouldn’t, but instead maybe I should pare the story down to its most basic elements.

I will let the readers decide.

Above: Säntis Berg, Switzerland (Swiss German: Schweiz)

Andersen realized that children need wholesome stories in the same way that they need fibre and fruit.

Just as there has been a concerted effort in recent years to reintroduce children to the benefits of exercise and decent nutrition (lessons Steve has taught to children as a gym teacher), there has similarly been a battle that many parents, publishers, librarians and teachers have been fighting to engae children once more with the joy of reading.

Our children deserve the best and that is as true for writing as it is for anything else.

We live in a culture of plenty.

Most people in the industrialized world have plenty of food, decent accommodation, as well as education, health, recreation and entertainment facilities that would astonish our recent ancestors.

Everyone in Canada and the US and the UK and Australia and New Zealand is already a lottery winner when compared with the majority of the world’s population.

And yet we often seem determined to squander these gifts.

Many of our children are bored witless despite a plethora of entertainment choices that someone someone born in my generation can only marvel at.

Who could have predicted when I was a boy that there would be digital TV, video games, Wii, PSP, Nintendo DS, and giant plasma screen HD TV?

Above: Children playing ball games, Roman artwork, 2nd century AD, Louvre Museum, Paris, France

And yet many children seem restless and dissatisfied.

Parents are consequently frustrated and cross.

The trouble is that a lot of the entertainment offered to us and our children is junk, the equivalent of a non-stop diet of fizzy pop and sweets.

A good book, a good story, can show them that Life need not be lived through a lens.

Reading might seem hard work when compared with sitting in front of the television all day.

And nearly every parent has used children’s television as a babysitter from time to time.

Yes, TV and computers can be educational, but so can dissection and we don’t usually allow to undertake that kind of experiment unsupervised.

The main drawback of allowing children unfettered access to the various screen-based entertainments is that the lassitude it induces becomes addictive.

But even worse than this is the fact that a room without someone burbling away in the corner begins to seem unnatural to children.

They becomes unnerved by quiet and by reflection because quiet and reflection is so rare to them.

They become scared of it, in the way that previous generations were scared of the woods and the darkness.

The modern world is loud and bright and children have access to unlimited options.

Reading can offer a rare and vital moment of peace and reflection.

We all know that a book is the real thing for a child when that child demands to have it read to them again and again.

A story is the real thing when we know every word by heart and still we want it read to us.

A book is the real thing when it completely absorbs the child.

Children are a difficult audience.

Not only do books have to compensate with all the other entertainment in what has become a visual rather than a literary culture, but children demand to be engrossed.

Generally, kids like books that are funny, that are full of adventure, that feature strong close relationships that are gripping without being too frightening and that end more or less happily.

It is a tall order but if a child loves your book then they will love it forever, read it over and over, and seek out other stories that you may write.

And herein lies the value of International Children’s Book Day.

Here is the reason that Andersen’s birthday was chosen to celebrate this Day.

Discover children’s books.

Rediscover the child within you.

Read the classic stories like the Famous Five, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Narnia and Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter, Robert Louis Stephenson, Jules Verne and Hans Christian Andersen.

Read as much modern children’s literature as you can.

What do the fine folks of the International Board of Books for Young People recommend?

Read to find the child within you.

Write to listen to what that child has to say.

You will be glad you did.

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Google Photos

• The Story of My Life and İn Sweden, Hans Christian Andersen (Abe Books)

• “How to Write a Great Story in 5 Steps“, Lindsay Kramer, Grammarly, 23 September 2022

• Get Started in Creative Writing, Stephen May (Teach Yourself)

Revolving doors

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Monday 1 April 2024

Local elections in Türkiye took place on 31 March 2024 throughout the country’s 81 provinces.

A total of 30 metropolitan and 1,363 district municipal mayors, alongside 1,282 provincial and 21,001 municipal councillors were elected, in addition to numerous local non-partisan positions such as neighbourhood wardens (muhtars) and elderly people’s councils.

The elections took place nine months after the 2023 parliamentary and presidential elections, where the Nation Alliance (“The Table of Six“) opposition coalition suffered an unexpected narrow defeat to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s governing People’s Alliance.

Above: Logo of the Table of Six

Above: President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

This was despite an ongoing economic crisis and rapidly rising inflation.

Following the defeat, the opposition six-party coalition dissolved, with the main opposition parties Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Good Party (İYİ) fielding separate candidates for effectively all mayoral positions.

Above: Logo of the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) (Republican People’s Party)

Above: Logo of the Good Party

This was the first nationwide election to be contested by the CHP’s new leader Özgür Özel, who had successfully challenged his predecessor Kemal Kılıcdaroğlu for the position in November 2023.

Above: Özgür Özel, Leader of the Opposition

Above: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu

The Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), which succeeded the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) as Turkey’s principal Kurdish minority rights party, fielded its own candidates in many western metropoles, despite having previously withdrawn candidates in favour of the Nation Alliance.

Above: Logo of the People’s Equality and Democracy Party

Above: Logo of the Peoples’ Democratic Party

The results were an unexpectedly large victory for the opposition CHP, first time since the 1977 Turkish general election, which despite the lack of any electoral pacts managed to retain most of its metropolitan mayoralties by an increased share of the votes.

In particular, the CHP’s Istanbul  candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu was re-elected with 51% of the vote, while Ankara candidate Mansur Yavaş was re-elected with 61%.

Above: Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu

Above: Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş

Both mayors also won majorities in their respective metropolitan councils, giving them significantly more powers than their previous terms.

The CHP also won many unexpected victories in areas that had been under government control for the previous two decades, including Bursa, Balıkeser, Manisa, Kütahya, Adıyaman, Amasya, Kırikkale and Denizli.

Overall, the CHP won 35 of Turkey’s 81 provincial capitals, with the People’s Alliance winning 24.

Above: Flag of the Republic of Türkiye

This was the first election since the governing Justice and Development Party (AK Party)’s establishment in 2001 that it did not come first in a national election, with the CHP winning 37.5% of the vote compared to the AK Party’s 35.5%.

Above: Logo of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party)

Commentators compared the vote to the 1989 local elections, where the centre-left opposition had scored significant victories against a right-wing government and came first in the popular vote.

Nevertheless, the People’s Alliance did score some victories against the opposition, taking the traditionally opposition-leaning mayoralties of Hatay and Kırklareli.

The smaller centre-right opposition İYİ Party performed poorly across the country, coming 6th in terms of popular vote and losing over half its vote share.

Meanwhile, the Islamist conservative New Welfare Party (YRP) came 3rd with over 6% of the vote, winning many municipalities in conservative areas from the AK Party.

Above: Logo of the Yeniden Refah Partisi (New Welfare Party)

The pro-Kurdish DEM Party marginally improved their share of the vote, despite some calls for boycotts in their traditional strongholds due to the likelihood of mayors being forcibly removed from office by the Interior Ministry on charges of supporting separatist terrorism.

The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the AK Party’s junior alliance partner, lost votes but retained control of many key municipalities that it had won in the previous election.

Above: Logo of the Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (Nationalist Movement Party)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Tayyip Erdoğan said he is not satisfied with Sunday’s provincial elections, promising to closely examine potential mistakes of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and rectify them. 

Erdoğan’s AKP trailed behind in the local polls, losing numerous municipalities.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) emerged as the main winner of the elections, according to preliminary results published by state media. 

“Unfortunately, we did not get the result we wanted and hoped for from the local election exam,” Erdogan told supporter in his first post-election speech midnight. 

“We will definitely take the necessary steps by weighing the messages given by the nation at the ballot box in the most accurate and objective way,” he added, concluding that “wherever we lose or fall behind, we will identify the reasons very well and make the necessary interventions”.

The vote was seen as a barometer of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity as he sought to win back control of key urban areas he lost to the opposition in elections five years ago. 

The CHP’s victory in Ankara and Istanbul in 2019 over Erdogan’s AKP had shattered his aura of invincibility. 

A six-party opposition alliance that was led by CHP disintegrated after it failed to oust Erdogan in last year’s election, unable to capitalize on the economic crisis and the government’s initially poor response to last year’s devastating earthquake that killed more than 53,000 people.

Yet, in Sunday’s vote, Imamoglu — a popular figure touted as a possible future challenger to Erdogan — still ran without the support of some of the parties that helped him to victory in 2019.

Both the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party and the nationalist IYI Party fielded their own candidates in the race.

Some 61 million people, including more than a million first-time voters, were eligible to cast ballots for all metropolitan municipalities, town and district mayorships as well as neighbourhood administrations.

Turnout was around 76%, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency, compared to 87% last year.

Analysts said a strong showing for Erdogan’s party would have hardened his resolve to usher in a new constitution — one that would reflect his conservative values and allow him to rule beyond 2028 when his current term ends.

Erdogan, who has presided over Turkey for more than two decades — as Prime Minister since 2003 and President since 2014 — has been advocating for a new constitution that would put family values at the forefront.

Above: Seal of the President of Türkiye

In Eskişehir, Ayşe Ünlüce (CHP) took 51% of the vote.

Born in Eskişehir in 1970, Ayşe Ünlüce completed her primary, secondary and high school education in Eskişehir and her undergraduate education at İzmir Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Law.

Ünlüce, who started her career as a high criminal judge and later turned to lawyer, was appointed by Eskişehir Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Yılmaz Büyükerşen.

She was appointed as the General Secretary of the Metropolitan Municipality.

Ünlüce, who retired from the General Secretary of the Metropolitan Municipality in December 2023, is a mother of two children.

Above: The new Mayor of Eskişehir Ayşe Ünlüce

The CHP became the first party with Büyükerşen, receiving 285,688 votes and 52.30%.

According to the data announced by the agencies, CHP’s Ünlüce became the new mayor of Eskişehir Metropolitan Municipality with 48.50% of the votes. 

In Eskişehir, where AKP’s votes dropped significantly, Nebi Hatipoğlu, the common candidate of the People’s Alliance, came in second place with 39.62%.

AKP candidate Burhan Sakallı had a rate of 45.14% with 246,582 votes in the 2019 elections.

In the 2019 elections, AKP won the mayoralty of six districts: Beylikova, Günyüzü, İnönü, Mihalgazi, Sarıcakaya and Sivrihisar.

In this election, İnönü, Mihalgazi, Sarıcakaya came under AKP rule again, while the CHP period began in Sivrihisar and İnönü.

While MHP won in Mihalıççık, where CHP did not nominate a candidate, Han district passed to AKP.

Above: Mayoress Ayşe Ünlüce

As a new mayor prepares to begin her mandate, I want to linger for a moment on the legacy of the departing mayor.

Yılmaz Büyükerşen (born 8 November 1937) is a Turkish politician, educator and outgoing mayor of Eskişehir.

Above: Eskişehir Mayor Yılmaz Büyükerşen

Büyükerşen graduated from the Eskişehir Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences (later renamed Anadolu University) in 1962.

During his academy years, he worked as a reporter, columnist, caricaturist and editor in various newspapers.

With his friends from the academy, he established a chamber theatre and later a municipal theatre with funds raised by selling their blood to blood banks.

With his studies on the use of radio and television in educational and cultural life, he first built a TV transmitter station and black-and-white training studios at the Academy so that TRT broadcasts in Ankara could be watched from Eskişehir, the second province after Istanbul, and then the first colour in Turkey.

He established the TV system in Eskişehir.

Following his graduation, he was offered an assistantship at the finance department of the academy.

In 1966, he earned his PhD. 

In 1968, he became Associate Professor.

In 1973, he became Professor.

Also in 1973, he prepared a model for open universities in Turkey.

In 1976, he was elected as chairman of the Eskişehir Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences.

In July 1998 he was awarded an honorary degree from the British Open University as Doctor of the University. 

Above: Coat of arms of the Open University

He has also been awarded the Legion of Honour by former French President François Mitterrand and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art by former President Kurt Waldheim.

Above: French President François Mitterrand (1916 – 1996)

Above: Austrian President / United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (1918 – 2007)

In 1982, with the new Law of Higher Education in Turkey, he was elected Rector of Anadolu University by the President of Turkey.

After his five-year term ended, he was elected again in 1987 by President Turgut Özal.

Above: Turgut Özal (1927 – 1993)

Besides this post, he served as a member of the Radio and Television High Council (RTÜK).

He was elected to chairmanship of the organisation twice.

In 1993, following new laws on RTÜK, his chairmanship ended.

Above: Logo of the Radio and Television Supreme Council

He established the first school of cinema and television in Eskişehir.

His focus has been on culture and literature, establishing faculties of literature, communication sciences, applied fine arts and also a state conservatory.

Büyükerşen is also the only professional wax sculptor in Turkey.

The wax sculpture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Anıtkabir Museum was designed and produced by Büyükerşen.

Above: Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 – 1931)

Above: Exterior of the Atatürk mausoleum building of Anıtkabir complex, Ankara, Türkiye

His works are also displayed in the Yılmaz Büyükerşen Wax Museum in Eskişehir.

Above: Wax sculpture of wax sculptor Büyükerşen

He is married with two children and two grandchildren.

As Mayor of Eskişehir, Büyükersen has accomplished the following:

• Establishment of the rail system in urban transportation: the system, whose first stage was 19 kilometers in 2004, reached a line length of 60 kilometers in 2019.

• Cleaning of Porsuk Stream along with environmental regulations and renewal of vehicle and pedestrian bridges on it. Trips are organized on the Porsuk with boats and gondolas.

• The construction of giant regional parks covering hundreds of acres in many parts of the city

• The establishment of art institutions such as the Symphony Orchestra and City Theaters, and
  the opening of new culture, arts and congress centres.
  Today, Eskişehir is the city with the most theater scenes in Turkey after Istanbul.

• Preparation and implementation of conservation and survival projects for historical buildings

• Completion of infrastructure deficiencies with the new treatment facilities of the city, with an artificial beach, a first in Turkey, in Kentpark, one of the two largest parks of the region, walking, sports and recreation areas. 

• Eshişehir has put into service many investments such as: 
  • Fairytale Castle, 
  • Zoo
  • Underwater World
  • Science Experiment Center
  • Space House
  • Pirate Ship  
  • Sazova Science Culture and Art Park, which is Eskişehir’s largest park.

• He also founded the Museums Complex, which includes the Yılmaz Büyükerşen Wax Sculptures Museum, the only one in Turkey.

• The complex also includes the Contemporary Glass Arts Museum, Urban Memory Museum and the Liberation Museum. 

He has enabled the construction of projects such as the improvement, cleaning and landscaping ofthe Porsul Çayı (Porsuk Stream), Sazova Park, boulevard and street arrangements, Kent Park, the continuation of the Odunpazarı Houses restoration and arrangement project and the Wax Sculpture Museum.

Infrastructure and water projects in Eskişehir were carried out during his period.

Tram, garden, sports and cultural centers in Eskişehir were built during his period. 

Thanks to his work, Eskişehir has become one of the most visited tourism centres – at least by Turks.

Büyükerşen showed his aptitude for fine arts such as painting and sculpture by opening departments at universities during his rectorship, and especially in the wax sculptures he created in his private life.

During his term as Mayor, he showed his interest in art with the statues he placed in Eskişehir.

He has been Mayor since 1999.

This was his 4th and last mandate as Mayor.

He aimed to give a message to the public with these statues, and from time to time, he received reactions and was criticized.

He opened Turkey’s first wax sculpture museum bearing his name on 19 May 2013. 

Büyükerşen’s autobiography, Zamanı Durduran Saat (The Time That Stops Time) and his biography, Bir Ömür Ki Yılmaz Büyükerşen, written by Mehmet Sadık Bozkurt, were published as books.

Büyükerşen transformed Eskişehir.

I can only hope that his successor will be as equally inspirational.