Humanities
This passage is adapted from the essay "My Father's Suitcase" by Orhan Pamuk (©2006 Orhan Pamuk).
Two years before my father died, he gave me a small suitcase filled with his manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual jocular, mocking air, he told me that he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after his death1.
Just take a look, he said, slightly embarrassed. "See if there's anything in there that you can use. Maybe after I'm gone you can make a selection and publish it." We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering around like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly, unobtrusively2, in a corner.
For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I knew what was inside some of the notebooks it held. I had seen my father writing in them. In his youth, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country where there were few readers.
The first thing that kept me away from my father's suitcase was, of course, a fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father understood this, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take the contents of the case seriously. By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But my real fear—the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover—was that my father might be a good writer3. If great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only—not a writer.
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is4. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way that one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.
I was afraid of opening my father's suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company. I would have to remember that my father enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts5—and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing. But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase he had bequeathed to me I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do.
In fact, I was angry6 at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarreled with his life, and had spent it happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me also knew that I was not so much "angry" as "jealous," and this, too, made me uneasy. What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you7?
On some deeper level, I was able to become a writer because my father, in his youth, had also wished to be one. I would have to read him with tolerance—to seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms. It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it. Using all my will power, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Paris hotels, a few poems8, paradoxes, analyses…
A week after he left me his suitcase, my father paid me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten that I was forty-eight years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics, and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father's gaze drifted to the corner where he had left his suitcase, and he saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead, I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself, he smiled at me the way he always did. And, as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things he always said to me, like a father.
As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy9 inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn't as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but at least I had devoted mine to writing. I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father's expense—of all people, my father, who had never been a source of pain to me, who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a void at the center of our lives, to our feelings of happiness and guilt10.