Status Updates From Estambul: Ciudad y recuerdos

A snowy cover for a snowy weather

"...I would continue to play as an adult whenever I got bored: I'd imagine that the place in which I was sitting (this bedroom, this sitting room, this classroom, this barracks, this hospital room, this government office) was really somewhere else; when I had exhausted the energy to daydream, I would take refuge in the photographs that sat on every table, desk, and wall."

"Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could lounge comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor that the householders were westernized."

"To my childish mind, these rooms were furnished not for the living but for the dead."

"I'd have liked to write my entire story this way-as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment...I cannot accept that the myths we tell about our first lives prepare us for the brighter, more authentic second lives that are meant to begin when we awake..that second life is none other than the book in your hand."

"It's a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams...Once imprinted in our minds, other people's reports of what we've done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember. And just as we learn about our lives from others, so too do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live."

"...self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date? These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to which the lottery of life has assigned us--they expect love from us, and in the end do we love them from the bottom of our hearts; but did we perhaps deserve better?"

"Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness."