Tuesday, April 2, 2019

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 25


BY ORHAN PAMUK


Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress.

"It is the failure to experience huzun," Pamuk says, "that leads him to feel it." 

According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. 

"What I am trying to explain," he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, "is the huzun of an entire city: of Istanbul."

--The Washington Post

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