he (his fatther) would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company.Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter.

Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature.

What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.

A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.

But, as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger . . . but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could. What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me.

I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

So my father was not the only one: we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West and I have beheld the world that he built on the other side.

Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, rising from the mist in its many colors like an island spied after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before us a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes—an entire world. Seeing this world, we wish to enter it and lose ourselves in it, just as we might in a book. After sitting down to write because we felt provincial, excluded, marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.