The breads I made are rustic and their crust is thick. I think it is due to the baking time.
The longer I baked, the thicker the crust became. However, if I paint the dough with water just before baking it, the water may form a coat of steam around the dough. The steam may help lower down the temperature, therefore the crust could be thin even though the baking time is the same.
I learned that professional ovens come with mist injection devices in order to make good quality crust. I think it is based on the same principle. Home-oven does not have the luxury of steam injection. I hope water painting skill I imagine could do the same effect. I will try it out next time I make breads.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Dullness and Quality
I am now re-reading Robert Pirsig's ZAMM without any specific order whenever I am in toilet. Here are some paragraphs I read this morning. ( Very strange, I read best when I am in toilet. This is a habit since my youth. )
"Or if he take whatever dull jobs he is stuck with--and they are all, sooner or later, dull--and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he is likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he did not think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going."
Indeed, from my personal experience, Quality usually grows out from Dullness. Dullness frees up our minds, hence our brains could think of Quality when they are free from forms. That is why meditation is done in such a way. I particularly like the phrase ".. and they are all, sooner or later..", which is very true in this world. The question is that when it becomes dull, what can you do about it? The way you handle it determines your Quality.
"Or if he take whatever dull jobs he is stuck with--and they are all, sooner or later, dull--and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he is likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he did not think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going."
Indeed, from my personal experience, Quality usually grows out from Dullness. Dullness frees up our minds, hence our brains could think of Quality when they are free from forms. That is why meditation is done in such a way. I particularly like the phrase ".. and they are all, sooner or later..", which is very true in this world. The question is that when it becomes dull, what can you do about it? The way you handle it determines your Quality.
Friday, April 27, 2007
What is good; what is bad? Hard to tell !
The title concludes my thoughts regarding the film, Quills. It also represents my attitude towards this world.
The movie, Quills, was inspired by the stories of Marquis de Sade, who was an atheist, an extreme freedom philosopher and a very controversial erotic writer. The English word, sadism, is derived from his name.
The brief plot of the movie goes on like this:
Marquis was prisoned in a madmen asylum overseen by a liberal Abbe. To cure Marquis, the Abbe encouraged him to write. With helps from a chambermaid, Madeleine, Marquis's stories leaked out and got published. His erotic stories became popular among people and the infamous popularity soon called for misfortunes. Emperor Napolean banned Marquis's stories and dispatched Dr. Royer Collard to tighten the administration of the asylum. That is where the movie begins its own story. With each of Marquis's fightings to write, the policy was further tightened and more misfortunes happened. The movie ends with the death of Madeleine, Simone's turn into a prostitute from an innocent angel, the Abbe's self-destruction into madness and Marquis's final relief.
In the story, there are several contrast characters -- Dr. Royer Collard and Marquis; Madeleine and Dr's young, superficially virginal wife, Simone. The Abbe himself also contrasts to Marquis, who does not believe in God.
Dr. Collad and Marquis stand on the two ends of spectrum in moral, at least, on the surface. Marquis never pretends to be a Saint. He is not shamed of being a libertine and an atheist. He is whom he claims to be. Dr. Collad, on the contrary, is a beast with a human-being's form, an evil with moral's outfit. He is a cruel old man who has no pity with other people. It was he that cruelly locked the cell's door while he knew that Madeleine was in danger inside. Marquis , in another cell, bursted in tears for being unable to save her. Who is moral in front of God, if there is one?
Madeleine assisted Marquis to spread his stories. She helped other patients in the asylum. She secretly loves the Abbe. She likes marquis's erotic stories. She said that "I imagined to play a part in those dirty stories so I could be a good girl in this real world". And, she died as a virgin. Madeleine is like a virginal lotus out from a dirty pond.
Unlike Madeleine, Simone was raised up in a church and received good education. She did not know of any earthly thing before marrying to Dr. Collad. She reads Marquis's stories, and before long, she seduced other man and indulged in lust.
Both Madeleine and Simone read same stories and why did they behave so differently? Who should be blamed, the reader Simone or the author Marquis? Why does looking-good thing turn bad and looking-bad thing good? After all, Marquis said that he only 'records' what truly happened. Why are people so weak in oppose to the truth? Otherwise, how can we explain the Abbe's final madness? Perhaps that is why Marquis chose to be an atheist since he has seen the hell.
Indeed, it is so difficult to tell what is good and what is bad in this world.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Example of Economic Hit Man
This is a contemporary example of Economic Hit Man.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9642196
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9642196
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
Friday, April 13, 2007
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night. This was the news being broadcasted on NPR when the radio alarm waked me at 7:30 AM. I knew Vonnegut, but I thought he was dead long time ago. I did not realize he was a living icon until he now is surely dead.
To be precise, I don't know Vonnegut himself, but his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. To be more precise, I forget about the content of the novel, but keep all memories associated with it. They happened in that hot and humid summer in 1992; they happened when I liked one girl very much. In 1992, during the summer, I stayed at school and took Japanese 101 in the neighboring QingHua U. since that girl also took the class. To see her is my only motivation to take the course. I thought that I may have a chance to chat with her after the class on the way back to Chiao-Tung U.
Days in and days out. My Japanese and other things (I took other classes, too) improved a lot except my relationship with her. She was still like a dove which always kept a safe distance from me, and I was just too shy to say anything beyond "Hello. It is so hot today." A dumb conversation easily choked a budding love affair. I was troubled by this situation very much, but just did not know how to fix it.
To attend Japanese 101, I had to pass by a big white building in Qing-Hua U., and I was very curious about that building. One day, in order to expel my sorrow, I decided to visit it. It was the main library. Comparing to the one in Chiao-Tung, this library contains much more novels--the fine, contemporary but classical ones. Slaughterhouse-Five is among them. For the rest of the vacation, I constantly visited the library during weekends. I picked up a looking-good novel, took a table close to the window, dived into the novel and forgot about the girl.
I now can't fully recall what Slaughterhouse-Five is about, but all memories associated with the book in that hot summer in 1992 come back to me as vivid as they just happened yesterday.
To be precise, I don't know Vonnegut himself, but his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. To be more precise, I forget about the content of the novel, but keep all memories associated with it. They happened in that hot and humid summer in 1992; they happened when I liked one girl very much. In 1992, during the summer, I stayed at school and took Japanese 101 in the neighboring QingHua U. since that girl also took the class. To see her is my only motivation to take the course. I thought that I may have a chance to chat with her after the class on the way back to Chiao-Tung U.
Days in and days out. My Japanese and other things (I took other classes, too) improved a lot except my relationship with her. She was still like a dove which always kept a safe distance from me, and I was just too shy to say anything beyond "Hello. It is so hot today." A dumb conversation easily choked a budding love affair. I was troubled by this situation very much, but just did not know how to fix it.
To attend Japanese 101, I had to pass by a big white building in Qing-Hua U., and I was very curious about that building. One day, in order to expel my sorrow, I decided to visit it. It was the main library. Comparing to the one in Chiao-Tung, this library contains much more novels--the fine, contemporary but classical ones. Slaughterhouse-Five is among them. For the rest of the vacation, I constantly visited the library during weekends. I picked up a looking-good novel, took a table close to the window, dived into the novel and forgot about the girl.
I now can't fully recall what Slaughterhouse-Five is about, but all memories associated with the book in that hot summer in 1992 come back to me as vivid as they just happened yesterday.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
秋游波城
秋游波城 2001文蕾作
深秋枫正红，携家波城游。
久闻哈佛名，直奔剑桥头。
红叶映新骄，旧舍叙史悠。
踊摸铜像足，愿得子孙优。
又行查理河，垂柳拂岸秀。
两校依水立，严谨数麻工。
漫步自由道，细述自由说。
兴尽披霞归，友人烧烤候。
美酒伴佳肴，喜极展歌喉。
畅谈陈年趣，不知夜已旧。
当即许好友，它日再来游。
Monday, April 02, 2007
Homemade Bread
Recently, I developed my own philosophy of craftsmanship and I decided to apply it. Artisan bread is one of things I can contribute to.
The result is quite successful. The bread tastes great under the cherry blossoms. Here is my secret for its quality:
The reason why resting the mass for 10-15 minutes is to let the fabric of flour reorganize themselves. This is what I learned from the book. It speeds up the whole process, then reduces the number of kneading, then reduces the exposed surface to oxygen, and therefore, increases the flavor of the bread. Raising in the oven is my idea. Oven is a perfect place for raising since it is a closed environment with controllable temperature setting. The ideal temperature is 70-80F and that is why I preheat the oven with 'warm' setting. Holes in bread is a key to a successful bread. The more holes the bread has; the softer the bread is. The number of holes depends on the degree of raising. That is why I chose to use instant yeast and 8-hour duration for raising. Moisture also directly contributes to the softness of bread. More water during the mixing stage makes softer bread. Bake the bread in high temperature first, and the hardened surface of the bread encapsulates water inside.
The result is quite successful. The bread tastes great under the cherry blossoms. Here is my secret for its quality:
- 3 1/3 cups of flour, 1 1/2+ cup of warm water, 2 teaspoon of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of instant active yeast.
- Mix all of them together, roughly kneading into a shaggy ball.
- Rest the ball for 10-15 minutes.
- Kneading the ball for another 10-15 minutes until it becomes smooth.
- Pre-heat the oven to 'warm' level. Put the mass into a big mix bowl covered with a wet sheet of paper-tower. Put the bowl in the oven for rising.
- Leave it in the oven for 8 hours.
- On a well-floured surface, roll the flour mass and cut it into four balls. Each of balls can be stuffed with minced garlic.
- Pre-heat the oven for 420 F.
- Put the balls into the oven for 40 minutes.
The reason why resting the mass for 10-15 minutes is to let the fabric of flour reorganize themselves. This is what I learned from the book. It speeds up the whole process, then reduces the number of kneading, then reduces the exposed surface to oxygen, and therefore, increases the flavor of the bread. Raising in the oven is my idea. Oven is a perfect place for raising since it is a closed environment with controllable temperature setting. The ideal temperature is 70-80F and that is why I preheat the oven with 'warm' setting. Holes in bread is a key to a successful bread. The more holes the bread has; the softer the bread is. The number of holes depends on the degree of raising. That is why I chose to use instant yeast and 8-hour duration for raising. Moisture also directly contributes to the softness of bread. More water during the mixing stage makes softer bread. Bake the bread in high temperature first, and the hardened surface of the bread encapsulates water inside.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Xiao Tian tossed on the bed and could not sleep, so he got up and wandered along the beach. It was a clear night. Moonlight sprinkled down from the sky. Xiao Tian just enjoyed the romantic atmosphere around the lake.
Suddenly, the moonlight disappeared. Before Xiao Tian understood what happened, he first realized that he was in the air! It turned out that a big Eagle can't sleep either, so he flew out and seek his prey. (If Xiao Tian remained on the bed, he could avoid this disaster. However, he also missed the chance of adventures if he have done so! Of course, I won't tell Anbo the last part.)
The Eagle brought Xiao Tian back to his nest. There are several hungry baby eagles. They pecked Xiao Tian. Poor Xiao Tian was thrilled. He backed up and up, eventually he dropped out of the nest and fell into a very deep valley. It is so deep that the bottom can't be seen.
Before reaching the bottom, Xiao Tian fainted due to scary. Before long, Xiao Tian was awakened by a small read wild horse. The little horse soon befriended with Xiao Tian. He took Xiao Tian back to his tribe -- a herd of 40 or so wild horses.
Xiao Tian was hungry and wanted to do fishing, so he made a leave-boat. He sailed out and the little horse swam beside him. The lake was so clean that the beautiful under-water scene attracted Xiao Tian. Therefore, under the little horse's encouragement, Xiao Tian overcame his fear and learned how to swim. And Xiao Tian succeeded ! While enjoying being surrounded by cool water, Xiao Tian saw two mermaids swam toward hims. They invited Xiao Tian to their palace. Riding on the back of the little horse, Xiao Tian swam behind the two mermaids for the palace.
Suddenly, the moonlight disappeared. Before Xiao Tian understood what happened, he first realized that he was in the air! It turned out that a big Eagle can't sleep either, so he flew out and seek his prey. (If Xiao Tian remained on the bed, he could avoid this disaster. However, he also missed the chance of adventures if he have done so! Of course, I won't tell Anbo the last part.)
The Eagle brought Xiao Tian back to his nest. There are several hungry baby eagles. They pecked Xiao Tian. Poor Xiao Tian was thrilled. He backed up and up, eventually he dropped out of the nest and fell into a very deep valley. It is so deep that the bottom can't be seen.
Before reaching the bottom, Xiao Tian fainted due to scary. Before long, Xiao Tian was awakened by a small read wild horse. The little horse soon befriended with Xiao Tian. He took Xiao Tian back to his tribe -- a herd of 40 or so wild horses.
Xiao Tian was hungry and wanted to do fishing, so he made a leave-boat. He sailed out and the little horse swam beside him. The lake was so clean that the beautiful under-water scene attracted Xiao Tian. Therefore, under the little horse's encouragement, Xiao Tian overcame his fear and learned how to swim. And Xiao Tian succeeded ! While enjoying being surrounded by cool water, Xiao Tian saw two mermaids swam toward hims. They invited Xiao Tian to their palace. Riding on the back of the little horse, Xiao Tian swam behind the two mermaids for the palace.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
I am quite happy that I can now read faster and faster in English. I finished John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in two days. There are two reasons why I could finish the book fast: the book itself is easy to read and I consciously practice the principles of "How to read a book".
Recently, Chinatimes translated and published a book titled "经济杀手的告白“。Chinatimes put the first chapter on line. After skimming the chapter, I assessed the book would help me understanding better what is going on in this world. So, I borrowed the book from our local library and started reading it. I was not disappointed. The book answered many questions. However many more questions are not answered. I hope Arnold J. Toynbee can help me finding them.
Recently, Chinatimes translated and published a book titled "经济杀手的告白“。Chinatimes put the first chapter on line. After skimming the chapter, I assessed the book would help me understanding better what is going on in this world. So, I borrowed the book from our local library and started reading it. I was not disappointed. The book answered many questions. However many more questions are not answered. I hope Arnold J. Toynbee can help me finding them.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Next day, the Elephant felt much better when he waked. It must be due to Xiao Tian's medicine. The elephant thanked Xiao Tian. The elephant lead all of them to a cool spring water nearby. After drinking delicious spring water, everyone felt refreshed.
The elephant invited Xiao Tian and his father to ride on him. They wandered on the savanna. On the elephant's back, they saw lots of animals on the grass field. There are lions, zebras and horses. Suddenly, animals looked scared and ran away. Before long, the sun disappeared, too. A huge shadow fall upon them. Xiao Tian and his father did not have faintest idea what was going on. The elephant urged them to hold tight since he is going to run away from the flying fire-dragon, Dilon.
The fire balls, from Dilon, almost hit them. Finally, the elephant successfully escaped from Dilon and hide in a narrow cave. Dilon waited outside of the cave and looked angry. In the cave, the elephant told Xiao Tian about Dilon's story -- why and how Dilon turned into an ugly fire dragon from a naughty and bad-tempered boy.
Outside of the cave, Dilon outcried. After the story, Xiao Tian paid his sympathy to Dilon. Both the elephant and Xiao Tian's father thought it is a stupid idea to feel sorry for Dilon. After all, Dilon suffered from what he deserved. Xiao Tian is a good boy and he thought everyone can be changed. He decided to give it a try tomorrow.
At night, Xiao Tian, his father and the elephant slept in the cave while Dilon still waited outside.
The elephant invited Xiao Tian and his father to ride on him. They wandered on the savanna. On the elephant's back, they saw lots of animals on the grass field. There are lions, zebras and horses. Suddenly, animals looked scared and ran away. Before long, the sun disappeared, too. A huge shadow fall upon them. Xiao Tian and his father did not have faintest idea what was going on. The elephant urged them to hold tight since he is going to run away from the flying fire-dragon, Dilon.
The fire balls, from Dilon, almost hit them. Finally, the elephant successfully escaped from Dilon and hide in a narrow cave. Dilon waited outside of the cave and looked angry. In the cave, the elephant told Xiao Tian about Dilon's story -- why and how Dilon turned into an ugly fire dragon from a naughty and bad-tempered boy.
Outside of the cave, Dilon outcried. After the story, Xiao Tian paid his sympathy to Dilon. Both the elephant and Xiao Tian's father thought it is a stupid idea to feel sorry for Dilon. After all, Dilon suffered from what he deserved. Xiao Tian is a good boy and he thought everyone can be changed. He decided to give it a try tomorrow.
At night, Xiao Tian, his father and the elephant slept in the cave while Dilon still waited outside.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Xiao Tian, accompanied by Pink Pig and Grandpa Grasshopper, finally found his father. His father and mother were just back from sailing. On the boat, the father introduced Xiao Tian every level including the deck. In the refrigerator, there were a huge octopus and a big shark. The father told Xiao Tian how he caught these two monsters.
On the deck, the father invited Xiao Tian to fly with him in a small airplane. In the air, both of them saw a poor elephant fainting on a small island. Xiao Tian wants to save the poor one, but his father feared to death and did not want to go. Xiao Tian educated his father that all poor ones are worthy to be saved no matter how they look.
Reluctantly, Xiao Tian's father landed the plane and Xiao Tian rushed to the fainted elephant. The poor one was crying. Xiao Tian checked the elephant, found the problem, and cured him. At night, they camped by the elephant.
On the deck, the father invited Xiao Tian to fly with him in a small airplane. In the air, both of them saw a poor elephant fainting on a small island. Xiao Tian wants to save the poor one, but his father feared to death and did not want to go. Xiao Tian educated his father that all poor ones are worthy to be saved no matter how they look.
Reluctantly, Xiao Tian's father landed the plane and Xiao Tian rushed to the fainted elephant. The poor one was crying. Xiao Tian checked the elephant, found the problem, and cured him. At night, they camped by the elephant.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Our family had a long trip to Centreville, MD yesterday. We visited there to see the model house and Wenlei liked the model house.
On the way to the Centreville, we went through the Bay Bridge. The blue sky, the sunshine and the reflections of the ocean waves made me feel I was driving in San Francisco, California. Therefore, I had a good mood and driving was enjoyable. It would be better if there are few vineyards there, too. There might have, but I have to find out.
There is one thing special about this trip -- everyone got what he or she likes. Wenlei saw the house, I enjoyed the beautiful scene, and Anbo found his dreamy horses in the farms in Centreville.
It was certainly a nice trip. After all, if a trip, in which everyone got what he or she likes, can't be a nice trip, what else trip can be?
We had our dinner in Prena Bread in Germantown, MD. The pizza there was excellent. I would exclaim it was the best one I've ever had. The nice dinner concluded our nice trip.
On the way to the Centreville, we went through the Bay Bridge. The blue sky, the sunshine and the reflections of the ocean waves made me feel I was driving in San Francisco, California. Therefore, I had a good mood and driving was enjoyable. It would be better if there are few vineyards there, too. There might have, but I have to find out.
There is one thing special about this trip -- everyone got what he or she likes. Wenlei saw the house, I enjoyed the beautiful scene, and Anbo found his dreamy horses in the farms in Centreville.
It was certainly a nice trip. After all, if a trip, in which everyone got what he or she likes, can't be a nice trip, what else trip can be?
We had our dinner in Prena Bread in Germantown, MD. The pizza there was excellent. I would exclaim it was the best one I've ever had. The nice dinner concluded our nice trip.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Having a peaceful mind seems the only way to realize quality in our work -- no matter the work is to maintain a motorcycle, to design a software system, or to draw a picture.
In the latest episode of "殷媛小聚"，蒋勋 introduced a water-ink landscape drawing, 秋江渔父图，by 许道宁 in Song dynasty. He explains that the drawing is excellent because it merges the outside scene with the inward mood. Depending on viewer's mood, the picture unveils different details. A peaceful mind is needed by the drawer as well as by the viewer. An absent-minded viewer sees nothing but mountains and waters; however, a careful one sees that the painting is not about waters and lands, but about secrets of life and death.
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
In the latest episode of "殷媛小聚"，蒋勋 introduced a water-ink landscape drawing, 秋江渔父图，by 许道宁 in Song dynasty. He explains that the drawing is excellent because it merges the outside scene with the inward mood. Depending on viewer's mood, the picture unveils different details. A peaceful mind is needed by the drawer as well as by the viewer. An absent-minded viewer sees nothing but mountains and waters; however, a careful one sees that the painting is not about waters and lands, but about secrets of life and death.
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
Friday, February 23, 2007
I finished last chapters of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" on the flight back to U.S. This is a deep book -- you can read it many times and still learn new things each time.
To me, the most important chapters are 24, 25 and 26. The most important message I got is "Quality is a result of the peace of a mind".
To me, the most important chapters are 24, 25 and 26. The most important message I got is "Quality is a result of the peace of a mind".
Saturday, February 17, 2007
林红与友
重庆解放碑有一抄手达人，食客林红偕友夜访于不期。店未开，人未至。闻达人居陋巷， 巷深窄而黑无灯。为抄手，二人摸至达人居所。达人在寝。二人央求抄手于达人不依不饶。达人无奈，起而作抄手。食罢，二人归。吾闻之，但觉快意，二女子所为任性痛快而率真，颇具我辈之风， 可入吾食客列传。
Sunday, January 07, 2007
就是开阿
What will you think, when you see the four Chinese words---"就是开阿"? Will you associate them with someone's name? Perhaps not, if you know Chinese. The direct translation of the four words is "Just open it!".
But, it indeed is someone's Chinese name. 就是开阿 looks like an Africa-American, about 45-year old, around 5-feet and 3-inch tall, a little bit overweighted, and is probably crazy about Chinese culture. 就是开阿's English name is Joseph Tahar. I knew all of these because my dear fellow, Joseph, was standing in front of me in the lobby of National Aqurarium at Baltimore. Joseph preciously hold a painting and the four Chinese words, in Chinese calligraphy, dominated the major part of the painting. Two nicely-drawn Chinese golden dragons surrounded the four Chinese words, and Joseph Tahar, written in smaller and artistic calligraphy, floats above 就是开阿. Overall, the painting looks very nice if you forgo the meaning of those four chinese words.
Joseph bought the painting for that four little chinese words. He must know that those four little words represent his Chinese name. I guess that the artist painted Joseph's Chinese name after Joseph told the artist his English name because the pronunciations of Joseph Tahar and 就是开阿 sound alike. Joseph hold the painting so preciously that he probably will hang the painting in the best spot in his house. I sincerely hope he has no Chinese friends, otherwise, I worry his love towards Chinese culture will be blown away by his Chinese friends' laughs.
The author of the painting played a cruel naming joke on my poor fellow, Joseph. However, I have to admit that the artist did it excellently since I can't forget 就是开阿's English name!
What will you think, when you see the four Chinese words---"就是开阿"? Will you associate them with someone's name? Perhaps not, if you know Chinese. The direct translation of the four words is "Just open it!".
But, it indeed is someone's Chinese name. 就是开阿 looks like an Africa-American, about 45-year old, around 5-feet and 3-inch tall, a little bit overweighted, and is probably crazy about Chinese culture. 就是开阿's English name is Joseph Tahar. I knew all of these because my dear fellow, Joseph, was standing in front of me in the lobby of National Aqurarium at Baltimore. Joseph preciously hold a painting and the four Chinese words, in Chinese calligraphy, dominated the major part of the painting. Two nicely-drawn Chinese golden dragons surrounded the four Chinese words, and Joseph Tahar, written in smaller and artistic calligraphy, floats above 就是开阿. Overall, the painting looks very nice if you forgo the meaning of those four chinese words.
Joseph bought the painting for that four little chinese words. He must know that those four little words represent his Chinese name. I guess that the artist painted Joseph's Chinese name after Joseph told the artist his English name because the pronunciations of Joseph Tahar and 就是开阿 sound alike. Joseph hold the painting so preciously that he probably will hang the painting in the best spot in his house. I sincerely hope he has no Chinese friends, otherwise, I worry his love towards Chinese culture will be blown away by his Chinese friends' laughs.
The author of the painting played a cruel naming joke on my poor fellow, Joseph. However, I have to admit that the artist did it excellently since I can't forget 就是开阿's English name!
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Took Anbo to National Zoo
We took Anbo to National Zoo last Sunday (Dec/31/06). That was the third time Anbo visited the zoo. In the previous visits, Anbo was not very interested in animals. Most of time, he sucked
his thumb and stared at animals blankly. It was different this time. Anbo watched animals with great interests---his face flushed and he shouted excitingly when he saw cute ones, such as otters, giant panda and apes.
Anbo liked apes most. We visited the apes hall in the last minute. By the time we entered the hall, most of apes already finished their dinner. They just lay down; none of them were playing.
Those apes seemed like to lie close to windows, through which we watched them. There was a black Chimpanzee, who lay down by the window and lazily scratch his armpit. Anbo watched the chimpanzee scratching, giggled and said, "He is so cute !" At that moment, I felt my son is the cutest animal in the world.
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
his thumb and stared at animals blankly. It was different this time. Anbo watched animals with great interests---his face flushed and he shouted excitingly when he saw cute ones, such as otters, giant panda and apes.
Anbo liked apes most. We visited the apes hall in the last minute. By the time we entered the hall, most of apes already finished their dinner. They just lay down; none of them were playing.
Those apes seemed like to lie close to windows, through which we watched them. There was a black Chimpanzee, who lay down by the window and lazily scratch his armpit. Anbo watched the chimpanzee scratching, giggled and said, "He is so cute !" At that moment, I felt my son is the cutest animal in the world.
--
--peter
http://lishihwei.googlepages.com/home
Friday, December 29, 2006
My Father's Suitcase
The following article from New Yorker is another good article about one's father. I read it and like it a lot.
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
by ORHAN PAMUK
The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
Issue of 2006-12-25 and 2007-01-01
Posted 2006-12-18
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 death.
“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, unobtrusively, in a corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever quite forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back to our usual roles, taking life lightly, we relaxed. We talked as we always did—about trivial, everyday things, and Turkey’s never-ending political troubles, and my father’s mostly failed business ventures—without feeling too much sorrow.
For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I was already familiar with this small black leather case, with a lock and rounded corners. When I was a child, my father had taken it with him on short trips and had sometimes used it to carry documents to work. Whenever he came home from a trip, I’d rush to open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savoring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. The suitcase was a friend, a powerful reminder of my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt because of the mysterious weight of its contents.
I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature.
When I did finally touch my father’s suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it. But I knew what was inside some of the notebooks it held. I had seen my father writing in them. My father had a large library. In his youth, in the late nineteen-forties, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, 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. My father’s father—my grandfather—was a wealthy businessman, and my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man; he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties: this I understood.
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, too, 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 that was not what worried me most: my real fear—the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover—was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father’s suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was 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 is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. 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. As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me.
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. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.
When I became a writer, I knew that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who spoke of world writers much more than he ever spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps, I told myself, I would have to read my father’s notebooks with my gratitude in mind, remembering, too, how indebted I was to his large library. I would have to remember that, when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts—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.
Sometimes my father would stretch out on a divan, abandon the book or the magazine in his hand, and drift off into a dream, losing himself for the longest time. When I saw this expression on his face, which was so different from the one he wore for the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life, when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze, I would understand, with trepidation, that he was discontented. Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.
But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books—the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.
My father had a good library, fifteen hundred volumes in all—more than enough for a writer. By the age of twenty-two, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book. I knew which were important, which were light and easy reading, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library—build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. My father had built his library mostly on his trips abroad, with books from Paris and America, but he had also stocked it with books bought at Istanbul’s foreign-language bookshops in the forties and fifties.
In the seventies, I did begin, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer; as I related in my book “Istanbul,” I had come to suspect that I would not be a painter, as I had hoped, but I was not yet sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father’s library: that I was living in the provinces, far from the center of things. This was a feeling I shared with everyone in Istanbul in those days. There was another reason for my anxiety: I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists—whether painters or writers—and offered them no hope. In the seventies, when I took the money my father gave me and greedily bought faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul’s old booksellers, I was as affected by the pitiable state of these secondhand bookstores—and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers, who laid out their wares at roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls—as I was by their books.
As for my place in the world: in life, as in literature, I felt, fundamentally, that I was not “at the center.” At the center of the world, there was a life that was richer and more exciting than our own, and, like all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. In the same way, there was world literature, and its center was far away from me. Actually, what I had in mind then was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were certainly outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end of the room, there were Istanbul’s books—our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail—and at the other end were the books from this other, Western world, which bore no resemblance to ours, a lack of resemblance that caused us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later.
Books in general, it seemed to me in those days, were what we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found wanting. And it wasn’t only by reading that we could leave our Istanbul lives and travel West; it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris and shut himself up in a room, and then he had carried the notebooks back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it seemed to me that this was part of what was causing me disquiet: after working in a room, trying to survive as a writer in Turkey for twenty-five years, I was galled to see my father hide his deep thoughts in this suitcase, to see him act as if writing were work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason that I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.
In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled 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,” that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. I’d ask myself in a scornful, angry voice: 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 you?
But these were ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got the idea that the most important measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers—everyone acted as if it were. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family many times—how well did I know him, and how well could I say that I understood his disquiet?
So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father’s suitcase: Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life that I knew nothing about, something that he could endure only by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel and recognized several notebooks that my father had shown me years earlier, though without dwelling on them for long. Most of the notebooks I now took in my hands he had filled when he was in Paris as a young man. Although, like so many writers I admired—writers whose biographies I had read—I wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now, it did not take me long to realize that I would find nothing like that here. What disturbed me most was when, now and again, in my father’s notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father’s voice, I told myself; it wasn’t authentic, or, at least, it didn’t belong to the man I’d known as my father. Beneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote was a more profound fear: the fear that, deep inside, I was not authentic. If I found nothing good in my father’s writing, if I found him to have been overly influenced by other writers, I would be plunged into the despair that had afflicted me so strongly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I had felt these anxieties keenly, and, even as I battled them, I had feared that one day I would have to admit defeat—just as I had done with painting—and give up writing as well.
So these were the two things I felt as I closed my father’s suitcase and put it away: a sense of being marooned in the provinces, and a fear that I lacked authenticity. For years, I had, in my reading and my writing, been discovering, studying, and deepening these emotions, in all their variety and their unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colors. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities, and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, especially as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (in “My Name Is Red” and “The Black Book”) and the problems of life on the periphery (in “Snow” and “Istanbul”). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.
A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.
But, as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger . . . but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could. What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that lead them to commit stupid acts. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
So my father was not the only one: we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. Whereas the impulse that compels us to shut ourselves up in our rooms to write for years on end is a faith in the opposite, the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people the world over resemble one another. This, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West and I have beheld the world that he built on the other side.
All writers who have devoted their lives to their work know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places. It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father not have reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, rising from the mist in its many colors like an island spied after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before us a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes—an entire world. Seeing this world, we wish to enter it and lose ourselves in it, just as we might in a book. After sitting down to write because we felt provincial, excluded, marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.
What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me, the center of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life but because, for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its nights, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves. This world that I had created, like a man digging a well with a needle, then seemed truer than anything else.
As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it occurred to me that he might also have discovered this kind of happiness in the years he spent writing. I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all. He had never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father. He had always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw on my imagination, whether in freedom or in childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father. 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 poems, paradoxes, analyses. . . . As I write, I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel—when they fell into one of their deadly silences—my father would turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.
So let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
A week after he came to my office and 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. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding went only as far as it could go in a few seconds. 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 joy 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. You understand . . . 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 guilt.
But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, bringing with it an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, at the age of twenty-two, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons.” With trembling hands, I gave my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. I did this not only because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect; his opinion was very important to me because, unlike my mother, he had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived, two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he immediately threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked the book very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me and in my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I have now received with such great happiness. He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion or to set the prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, supporting his son, encouraging him by saying, “One day you’ll be a pasha!” For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.
My father died in December, 2002.
(© The Nobel Foundation, 2006. Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.)
The following article from New Yorker is another good article about one's father. I read it and like it a lot.
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
by ORHAN PAMUK
The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
Issue of 2006-12-25 and 2007-01-01
Posted 2006-12-18
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 death.
“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, unobtrusively, in a corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever quite forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back to our usual roles, taking life lightly, we relaxed. We talked as we always did—about trivial, everyday things, and Turkey’s never-ending political troubles, and my father’s mostly failed business ventures—without feeling too much sorrow.
For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I was already familiar with this small black leather case, with a lock and rounded corners. When I was a child, my father had taken it with him on short trips and had sometimes used it to carry documents to work. Whenever he came home from a trip, I’d rush to open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savoring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. The suitcase was a friend, a powerful reminder of my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt because of the mysterious weight of its contents.
I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature.
When I did finally touch my father’s suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it. But I knew what was inside some of the notebooks it held. I had seen my father writing in them. My father had a large library. In his youth, in the late nineteen-forties, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, 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. My father’s father—my grandfather—was a wealthy businessman, and my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man; he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties: this I understood.
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, too, 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 that was not what worried me most: my real fear—the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover—was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father’s suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was 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 is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. 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. As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me.
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. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.
When I became a writer, I knew that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who spoke of world writers much more than he ever spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps, I told myself, I would have to read my father’s notebooks with my gratitude in mind, remembering, too, how indebted I was to his large library. I would have to remember that, when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts—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.
Sometimes my father would stretch out on a divan, abandon the book or the magazine in his hand, and drift off into a dream, losing himself for the longest time. When I saw this expression on his face, which was so different from the one he wore for the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life, when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze, I would understand, with trepidation, that he was discontented. Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.
But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books—the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.
My father had a good library, fifteen hundred volumes in all—more than enough for a writer. By the age of twenty-two, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book. I knew which were important, which were light and easy reading, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library—build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. My father had built his library mostly on his trips abroad, with books from Paris and America, but he had also stocked it with books bought at Istanbul’s foreign-language bookshops in the forties and fifties.
In the seventies, I did begin, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer; as I related in my book “Istanbul,” I had come to suspect that I would not be a painter, as I had hoped, but I was not yet sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father’s library: that I was living in the provinces, far from the center of things. This was a feeling I shared with everyone in Istanbul in those days. There was another reason for my anxiety: I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists—whether painters or writers—and offered them no hope. In the seventies, when I took the money my father gave me and greedily bought faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul’s old booksellers, I was as affected by the pitiable state of these secondhand bookstores—and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers, who laid out their wares at roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls—as I was by their books.
As for my place in the world: in life, as in literature, I felt, fundamentally, that I was not “at the center.” At the center of the world, there was a life that was richer and more exciting than our own, and, like all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. In the same way, there was world literature, and its center was far away from me. Actually, what I had in mind then was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were certainly outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end of the room, there were Istanbul’s books—our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail—and at the other end were the books from this other, Western world, which bore no resemblance to ours, a lack of resemblance that caused us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later.
Books in general, it seemed to me in those days, were what we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found wanting. And it wasn’t only by reading that we could leave our Istanbul lives and travel West; it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris and shut himself up in a room, and then he had carried the notebooks back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it seemed to me that this was part of what was causing me disquiet: after working in a room, trying to survive as a writer in Turkey for twenty-five years, I was galled to see my father hide his deep thoughts in this suitcase, to see him act as if writing were work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason that I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.
In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled 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,” that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. I’d ask myself in a scornful, angry voice: 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 you?
But these were ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got the idea that the most important measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers—everyone acted as if it were. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family many times—how well did I know him, and how well could I say that I understood his disquiet?
So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father’s suitcase: Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life that I knew nothing about, something that he could endure only by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel and recognized several notebooks that my father had shown me years earlier, though without dwelling on them for long. Most of the notebooks I now took in my hands he had filled when he was in Paris as a young man. Although, like so many writers I admired—writers whose biographies I had read—I wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now, it did not take me long to realize that I would find nothing like that here. What disturbed me most was when, now and again, in my father’s notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father’s voice, I told myself; it wasn’t authentic, or, at least, it didn’t belong to the man I’d known as my father. Beneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote was a more profound fear: the fear that, deep inside, I was not authentic. If I found nothing good in my father’s writing, if I found him to have been overly influenced by other writers, I would be plunged into the despair that had afflicted me so strongly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I had felt these anxieties keenly, and, even as I battled them, I had feared that one day I would have to admit defeat—just as I had done with painting—and give up writing as well.
So these were the two things I felt as I closed my father’s suitcase and put it away: a sense of being marooned in the provinces, and a fear that I lacked authenticity. For years, I had, in my reading and my writing, been discovering, studying, and deepening these emotions, in all their variety and their unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colors. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities, and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, especially as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (in “My Name Is Red” and “The Black Book”) and the problems of life on the periphery (in “Snow” and “Istanbul”). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.
A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.
But, as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger . . . but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could. What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that lead them to commit stupid acts. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
So my father was not the only one: we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. Whereas the impulse that compels us to shut ourselves up in our rooms to write for years on end is a faith in the opposite, the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people the world over resemble one another. This, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West and I have beheld the world that he built on the other side.
All writers who have devoted their lives to their work know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places. It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father not have reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, rising from the mist in its many colors like an island spied after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before us a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes—an entire world. Seeing this world, we wish to enter it and lose ourselves in it, just as we might in a book. After sitting down to write because we felt provincial, excluded, marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.
What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me, the center of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life but because, for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its nights, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves. This world that I had created, like a man digging a well with a needle, then seemed truer than anything else.
As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it occurred to me that he might also have discovered this kind of happiness in the years he spent writing. I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all. He had never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father. He had always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw on my imagination, whether in freedom or in childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father. 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 poems, paradoxes, analyses. . . . As I write, I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel—when they fell into one of their deadly silences—my father would turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.
So let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
A week after he came to my office and 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. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding went only as far as it could go in a few seconds. 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 joy 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. You understand . . . 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 guilt.
But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, bringing with it an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, at the age of twenty-two, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons.” With trembling hands, I gave my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. I did this not only because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect; his opinion was very important to me because, unlike my mother, he had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived, two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he immediately threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked the book very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me and in my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I have now received with such great happiness. He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion or to set the prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, supporting his son, encouraging him by saying, “One day you’ll be a pasha!” For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.
My father died in December, 2002.
(© The Nobel Foundation, 2006. Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.)
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