When Orhan Pamuk, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, remembers his childhood in Istanbul, he speaks of steamed up windows that veil the world in a mystical haze. Rather than facing his troubles and realities, he, like his fellow Istanbulites, liked to wrap himself in a softening, comforting mellowness, a melancholic, hazy state called hüzün.
The word hüzün has an Arabic root, huzn, which, according to the Koran, means the feeling of deep spiritual loss. According to Sufi tradition, hüzün is the spiritual anguish one feels because they cannot be close enough to Allah in this world. It is therefore the absence of hüzün, which causes distress, not its presence. In Istanbul, to suffer from hüzün is an honor.
On cold winter mornings, Orhan Pamuk says, when the sun suddenly falls in the Bosphorus and that faint vapor begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so dense you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its landscapes. Hüzün is not the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together, of an entire city: Istanbul.
The traces of Istanbul’s glorious past are visible everywhere. The people of Istanbul carry on with their lives among these ruins – in a city so poor and confused, it can’t even dream of its former wealth, power, and culture. Hüzün rises out of the pain they feel for everything that has been lost, yet it gives their resignation an air of dignity.
For Hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and losses, but their principal cause. It’s not paralyzing, but it gives poetic license to be paralyzed.Defeat and poverty are not a historical end point, but a honorable beginning, fixed long ago before they were born.