Knowledge Gained After a Near-Death Experience

With a headline like this, you may be expecting me to lay some mystic gems on ya’. I am not confident making metaphysical statements—having a coronary bypass hasn’t given me wisdom. But prior to having open-heart I had a lot of ordinary knowledge—I had a college degree, a professional post-graduate degree, I’ve read something like 4500 books, read many magazines, comics, and zines, seen a bunch of movies and videos, not to mention knowledge gained doing things—in short, I’ve spent 61 years gradually acquiring various bits of knowledge. Since the surgery, I have been healing up, hardly moving at all. But I haven’t stopped acquiring knowledge.

This year, I have been dipping into the novels of Orhan Pamuk. Istanbul: Memories and the City is a memoir of Pamuk’s hometown. I get the idea that Pawuk was thinking about Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, when he composed this volume. He combines his lived experiences with how other people have lived in Istanbul (primarily literary people, but he also discusses visual artists—including himself. Pawuk was a serious painter as a teenager.) But Pawuk’s Istanbul was described by a wide variety of chroniclers. You grow up in a city that has been continuously inhabited for millennia—a city for whom its residents represent not just multiple dynasties and political periods, but different civilizations. Pawuk writes that travel memoirs were not common in Ottoman culture, but because Istanbul was a popular location for adventurous travelers from Europe, the city acquired a trove of memorable European travel writing by such writers as Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert. But wouldn’t it be weird for a Turkish writer to describe a Turkish place by quoting French writers? Pawuk then describes Turkish writers who were influenced by their French peers, including Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Ahmet Rasim and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Pawuk makes a distinction between literary Turks and Turkish newspaper columnists. It is not a judgmental distinction—the two literatures serve different purposes. Both types of literary expression illuminate different corners of Istanbul. Pawuk made the exploits of a newspaper columnist the subject of the excellent novel, The Black Book. In short, Istanbul is a city described by various distinct literary constituencies. Their varied points of view join in Pawuk’s memoir, becoming a sort of anthology of voices who, when joined, create a living portrait of the place. Of top of this literary description, Pawuk gives us a complicated personal (and family) story, including a description of a himself losing his virginity. Istanbul: Memories and the City is surprisingly erotic. This was the first piece of knowledge acquired after my coronary bypass.

The second bit of new knowledge was A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy. This book covers the entire history if Iran, from the Medes to the Achaemenids, Alexander and his generals, the Parthians and Sassanids, the Arab invasion, various Iranian and Turkish dynasties, the Mongol invasion and the establishment of the Ilkhanate, Tamerlane, various Shi’a dynasties, Iran trying to survive the “great game” between Russia and Great Britain, the Pahlavi dynasty and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. I knew a lot of this, but I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge. This book goes into more detail than I needed, and fills in a lot of empty spaces in my knowledge of Iran. Central Asia has over the past year become increasingly interesting to me. Why? Dunno. No matter how many books I read about it, I can never really know everything I’d like to. (And let’s be honest—I am unlikely to learn Persian at this point in my life. . .) As long as there is more to learn, both in terms of history, comparative religion, literature, and visual art, Central Asia will remain a fascination to me.

And the next book I read will add to my growing store of post heart-surgery knowledge. I wish I had some profound spiritual insight to lay on the readers of Pan—not just a meager spoonful of Turkish literature and Iranian history.

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