I hope to return to Istanbul soon, and perhaps listen to stories carried from Tehran. In preparation, I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a book rooted in a city where memory, melancholy, and longing assemble like evening mist over the Bosphorus.
I have lived a wandering life, and sometimes I wonder what it is like to belong to one place for most of one’s days, as many do. Pamuk writes from that rootedness. Yet some of the writers who shaped the modern imagination—Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—were sustained not by rootedness but by exile. They crossed languages and continents, drawing nourishment not from soil but from the absence of soil.
Pablo Neruda once wrote:
Exile is not being without a country;
It is being without a return.
It is the endless road,
The endless search,
The endless longing.
I, too, am an exile from Australia—not through politics, religion, or necessity—but because the desire to return quietly extinguished itself. Other fires rose in its place.
Pamuk says his imagination requires him to remain in the same city, on the same street, in the same house. Yet Pessoa, in The Book of Disquiet, speaks from the opposite condition:
I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot wish to be anything.
Apart from that, I carry within me all the dreams of the world.
The window of the room becomes the threshold between the intimate and the infinite. Outside, the street moves with lives we do not know. The world endures—real, impossibly real—with its hidden mysteries, its stones, its beings, and the quiet whitening of hair beneath time.
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Versión en Español
Espero regresar pronto a Estambul, y quizás escuchar historias traídas desde Teherán. Para prepararme, he estado leyendo Estambul de Orhan Pamuk, un libro nacido de una ciudad donde la memoria y la melancolía se entrelazan como la niebla del Bósforo.
He llevado una vida nómada, y a veces me pregunto qué significa pertenecer a un solo lugar. Pamuk escribe desde ese arraigo, mientras que Conrad, Nabokov y Naipaul fueron alimentados por el exilio. Neruda dijo:
El exilio no es no tener país,
sino no tener regreso.
Yo también soy un exiliado de Australia; no por necesidad, sino porque el deseo de volver se apagó. Pessoa escribió:
No soy nada…
Llevo dentro de mí todos los sueños del mundo.
La ventana se convierte en frontera entre el alma y la calle infinita donde la vida continúa, silenciosa e inabarcable.
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Version en Français
J’espère bientôt retourner à Istanbul, et entendre peut-être des histoires venues de Téhéran. Pour m’y préparer, je lis Istanbul d’Orhan Pamuk, où la ville devient mémoire et brume sur le Bosphore.
J’ai mené une vie nomade. Parfois je me demande ce que signifie habiter un seul lieu. Pamuk est enraciné; Conrad, Nabokov et Naipaul, eux, furent nourris par l’exil. Neruda écrivit:
L’exil n’est pas être sans patrie,
mais être sans retour.
Moi aussi, je suis un exilé de l’Australie, non par contrainte, mais parce que le désir de retour s’est éteint. Pessoa écrivit:
Je ne suis rien…
Je porte en moi tous les rêves du monde.
La fenêtre devient le seuil entre l’intime et l’infini, tandis que la rue poursuit sa vie, réelle, mystérieuse, indifférente.
