MikePadgett.com

A culture of sorrow

— Orhan Pamuk describes a collective sorrow that permeates his native city but this cultural meme seems to have taken root everywhere.”

I recently read a French translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Equal parts autobiography, meditation and literary examination, the book reflects on the past and present of one of the world’s great cities.

The central theme of Istanbul is a sense of collective sorrow that Pamuk perceives in his hometown and which he likens to huzun, a word of Arabic origin found in Islamic scripture.

Huzun translates roughly as “sadness for things lost” and according to Pamuk its use in the Koran is ambiguous. It may refer to a rejection of sadness at wordly loss since such things are nothing compared to Allah. Instead it may express the feeling of sadness provoked by a worldly event, entailing the reminder that one cannot be closer to Allah.

Pamuk suggests that huzun is an undercurrent felt by all natives of Istanbul who witnessed the years following the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

When the capital was moved to Ankara in late 1923, the Anatolian stronghold of the Republican movement, the old Ottoman seat was left to its own devices. For Istanbul the transition from empire to nation entailed a sustained period of urban decay characterised by the impoverishment of the population and the mass destruction of buildings by fire or neglect.

It occurred to me that this sensibility, when expanded beyond mere notions of nostalgia or specific historical circumstances, is by no means unique to Istanbul.

I have heard something similar from Iranians strongly aware (and proud) of their past greatness.

A whole culture has grown up around the concept of saudade in Cabo Verde and Lisboa.

And then Germans, always surprising in the subtle complexity of certain of their abstract nouns, have their weltschmerz. Perhaps most famously of all, there is the gauzy, insubstantial mono no aware of the Japanese.

No single word in English may do justice to what is a very intricate cultural meme but perhaps among the best is ‘wistfulness’.