Texts and Writings/Orhan Pamuk - Istanbul

Black and White(1)

그림자세상 2010. 3. 21. 21:22

  Accusstomed as I was to the semidarkness of our bleak museum house, I preferred being indoors. The street below, the avenues beyond, the city's poor neighborhoods seemed as dangerous as those in a black-and-white gangster film. And with this attraction to the shadow world, I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul. I love the earlu evenings when autumn is slipping into winter, when the leafless trees are trembling in the north wind and people in black coats and jackets are rushing home through the darkening streets. I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions; only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading, When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets of a winter's evening. I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night

 

 

has cloaked oue lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we're safe in our house, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past. And likewise, as I watch dusk descend like a poem in the pale light of the streetlamps to engulf these old neighborhoods, it comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe; the shameful poverty of pur city is cloaked from Western eyes.

  A photograph by Ara Guler perfectly captures the lonely back streets of my childhood, where concrete apartment buildings stand beside old wooden houses, the streetlamps illuminate nothing, and the chiaroscuro of twilight--the thing that for me defines the city--has decended. (Though today concrete apartments have come to crowd out the old wooden houses, the feelings is the same.) What draws me to this photograph is not just the cobblestone streets and pavements, the iron grills on the windows or the empty, ramshakle wooden houses--rather, it is the suggestion that, with evening having just fallen, these two dragging long shadows with them on their way home are actually pulling the blanket of night over the entire city.