by Elif Shafak
‘Thank you for your trouble, Jim, I owe you one,’ Azur said to the porter.
‘No trouble, sir.’
‘Don’t forget to come back at the end of class.’
The man gave a perfunctory nod and took his leave.
Azur scanned the young expectant faces forming a ring around him. In the raw light his eyes looked tired, a darker shade of green – a forest creek stirred by whorls of current. ‘How’s everyone this morning?’
The answers came in a lively chorus.
‘Well, if you need to catch up on sleep, which is scientifically proven to be impossible, here’s a chance. Could you please pass around these pillows?’
Each student took one. Meanwhile, the professor busied himself with the stove.
‘Sir, are we going to burn down the college?’ piped up Kevin.
‘How did you guess my evil plans? No, we won’t be burning anything.’
In a few seconds, the electric stove glowed a bright red.
‘All right, boys and girls. You are, let’s pretend, in your warm, cosy rooms; it’s freezing cold outside. What can you do, but fall asleep!’
The students glanced at one another.
‘Rest your heads on your pillows!’ Azur ordered.
They did as told. Everyone except Peri, who sat ramrod straight, eyes wide open with suspicion.
‘That’s the spirit, Peri. Be cautious. You never know, I might’ve filled the pillows with angry cats.’
She blushed, this time obeying.
Next Azur took the black paper and produced a roll of sticky tape from his pocket. He began to cover the windows. Cut off from the outside light, the room sank into semi-darkness. He turned on the CD player: the sound of a crackling fire drifted over them.
‘What’re we doing, sir?’ It was Kevin again.
‘We’re going to a place René Descartes visited often. A place of dreams!’
Someone suppressed a laugh but the rest of the group seemed interested.
‘He was about your age, the great philosopher. Have any of you done anything meaningful yet?’
Nobody answered.
‘Descartes had big ambitions. Yours are bigger, I’m sure. But his were based on methodological and philosophical inquiry.’
‘So are ours!’ said Bruno.
Azur rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll visit Descartes’s visions. In the first, the young philosopher is trudging up a hill. He fears he’s going to fall down. He knows he must try harder to reach his goals, but he thinks he cannot achieve anything without the help of a supreme power – God.’
Her head on her pillow, her eyes half closed, Peri listened.
‘Far in the distance he sees a chapel – the House of God. The wind lifts him up and carries him with such force that he is flung against its walls.’
‘Told you God was no good,’ said Kevin.
‘He gets up and brushes himself off. He enters a courtyard where he sees a man who tries to give him a melon – a fruit from a foreign land.’
‘That’s weird,’ murmured Ed, sitting beside Peri. He had brought along a tin of homemade biscuits, which he now opened and offered left and right.
Azur carried on, ‘Descartes wakes up in pain, sweating. He’s worried that the dream was caused by the devil. Where do evil thoughts come from – outside or within? He prays to God for protection. But what is God – an external source or a product of our mind? It is this question that leads him to the second dream when he manages to fall asleep again.’
Azur skipped to the next recording on the CD. The sound of thunder filled the room. ‘A tempest is raging around the philosopher. A storm is coming. Why do bad things occur in life, he asks. How can God let them happen if He is who He is? Descartes is confused. Alone. Resentful. This dream is dark, depressing.’
Peri thought of her brother Umut, not as the man he was today, hunched over a table where he made wind-chimes out of seashells for tourists he would never get to know, but as the young idealist who once wanted to change the world and correct every wrong. She remembered the conversations she had with her father, trying to make sense of why God had forsaken them. Her throat ached. The sadness that descended on her was so sharp her eyes welled with tears. She didn’t know what she believed in. Maybe God was a game only those with happy childhoods could play.
To defuse the flow of negative feelings, she rushed to ask, ‘What about the third dream, sir?’
Azur gave her a curious look. ‘Well, that’s the most important one. Descartes sees a book on a table, a dictionary. Then he sees another book, a book of poems. He opens the latter at random, reads a poem by Ausonius.’
‘Who?’ said Bruno, confounded.
‘Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Roman poet, grammarian, rhetorician.’ Azur pointed his finger at Peri. ‘Did you know he visited your city – Constantinople?’
Peri shook her head.
‘The poem’s first line is: What road shall I pursue in life?’ Azur said. ‘A man appears and asks Descartes what he thinks about it. But the philosopher can’t answer. Disappointed, the man disappears. Descartes feels embarrassed. He’s full of doubt – like all intelligent people. Now who’d like to interpret this dream?’
‘Well, that melon sounded naughty,’ said Bruno. ‘Maybe Descartes was in the closet. He had a crush on that Mr N. – whoever he is.’
‘Maybe.’ Azur sighed. ‘Or else, the dictionary represented science and knowledge. Poetry symbolized philosophy, love, wisdom. He thought God was telling him to bring them all together by means of reason and create a “marvellous science”. Here’s a question: can you create a marvellous science of your own to study God?’
‘How do we do that?’ said Mona.
‘Be polymaths,’ Azur replied. ‘Knit together different disciplines, synthesize, don’t just focus on “religion”. In fact, stay away from religion, it only divides and muddles. Go to mathematics, physics, music, painting, poetry, art, architecture … Approach God through unlikely channels.’
Peri felt a swell of excitement. Could she create her own marvellous science? How wonderful would that be! Could she throw into the mixture her love of books, her passion for science and learning and poetry, her unfailing melancholy, and also add in her elder brother’s broken spirit and lacerated flesh, her father’s blasphemies and drinking habits, her mother’s prayers and bleeding hands, her other brother’s seething anger, and blend them all into something solid, reliable, whole? Was it possible to make something delicious out of poor ingredients?
Azur said, ‘The third dream makes me wonder if the philosopher was afraid of being judged by others. To us, he’s the great René Descartes! But he thought of himself as small, insignificant. If any of you ever feel like you are not special enough, remember, even Descartes felt that way sometimes.’
Peri lowered her eyes. She understood what Azur was doing and she both hated and loved him for that. He was telling her, and her alone, to have more confidence in herself. He hadn’t forgotten the talk they had in his room.
When he finished the lecture, Azur played the last tune on his CD. ‘Beethoven, Missa solemnis,’ he said. ‘Immerse yourselves in it. Go back to sleep!’
Heads on their pillows, they savoured the music. No one spoke.
‘Lecture over,’ announced the professor and pressed the stop button.
Simultaneously, there was a light tap on the door. Azur called out in its direction, ‘Jim, come on in. On time as always.’
The porter entered, heading straight for the stove to take it away.
‘All right, everyone,’ Azur said. ‘In light of our discussion today, write an essay about Descartes’s Quest for Certitude and God. Before you put pen to paper, make sure you do your research. Speculation without knowledge is self-indulgent twaddle. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the students replied in chorus.
When Peri walked outside, her head was pounding. The wind and the force of things beyond control; the duality of good and evil; the need to make sense
of chaos; the codes embedded in dreams and the dreamlike quality of life; the loneliness of a young philosopher seeking truth; the first line of an old poem still relevant today: What road shall I pursue in life? Something inside her had shifted as she listened to Azur – a change so subtle as to be almost imperceptible, and also irreversible, leaving a void into which she was scared to peer for fear of what she might find. Beneath the surface of her usually reticent self, a fissure had opened, exposing her galloping heart. She wished he would carry on talking for days on end, to her and to her alone.
When Azur spoke of God and life and faith and science, his words clung together like tiny grains of steamed rice, ready to feed hungry minds. In his company, Peri felt consummate, undivided, as if there were, after all, another way of looking at things – different from her father’s approach as well as her mother’s. In Azur’s words she found a passage out of the tiresome duality she had grown up with in the Nalbantoğlu household. Next to Azur she could embrace the many facets of who she was and still be welcomed. She did not have to suppress, control or hide any side of her. Azur’s universe was outside the rigid dichotomies of good and evil, God and Sheitan, light and dark, superstition and reason, theism and atheism. He himself was above all the quarrels that Mensur and Selma had had over the years, and, somehow, passed on to their daughter. Peri sensed deep in her soul, though she would deny it for as long as possible, that she was infatuated with her professor. There was something frighteningly dangerous in the expectation that someone had the answer to most of our questions, and that through that person was a shortcut to all that was left unsolved henceforth.
The Mantle
Oxford, 2001
‘Find new narratives, always plural. We often try to reduce our understanding of God to a single answer – a formula. Wrong!’
Professor Azur was walking rapidly from side to side, hands in his pockets.
Up until a few decades ago, he said, even the brightest scholars were certain that by the twenty-first century religion would have vanished from the face of the earth. Instead religion made a spectacular comeback in the late 1970s, like a diva returning to the stage, and ever since it has been here to stay, its voice louder with each passing year. ‘Today’s heated arguments revolve around matters of faith.’
This century was bound to be more religious than the preceding one – at least, demographically, since the pious tended to have more children than the secular. But in our fixation with religious, political and cultural conflicts, we let slip a crucial riddle: God. Whereas in former times, philosophers – and their pupils – grappled more with the idea of God than with religion, now it was the other way round. Even the theist–atheist debates, which had become quite popular in intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic, were more about politics and religion and the state of the world than the possibility of God. By weakening our cognitive ability to put forth existential and epistemological questions about God and by severing our link with philosophers of times past, we were losing the divinity of imagination.
Peri saw that most of the students were taking notes, bent on capturing every word. She was content just to listen.
‘Too many suffer from M.O.C.,’ said Azur. ‘Anybody know what that is?’
Kevin ventured. ‘Modern Obesity Curse?’
‘Machismo of the Crazed?’ Elizabeth joined in.
Azur smiled as if he were expecting these answers and said, ‘The Malady of Certainty.’
Certainty was to curiosity what the sun was to the wings of Icarus. Where one shone forcefully, the other couldn’t survive. With certainty came arrogance; with arrogance, blindness; with blindness, darkness; and with darkness, more certainty. This he called, the converse nature of convictions. During these lectures they were not going to be sure of anything, not even the seminar syllabus, which was, like everything else, subject to change. They were fishermen casting wide nets into the ocean of knowledge. Ultimately, they might catch a swordfish; or they might return empty-handed.
They were travellers too, companions of the road, having yet to arrive at any particular destination and perhaps never to do so. They were only striving, searching. For in a world of elusive complexity, only this was clear: diligence was better than idleness, spiritedness preferable to apathy. Questions mattered more than answers; curiosity was superior to certitude. They were, in short, ‘The Learners’.
The Malady of Certainty, though impossible to shed once and for all, could be imagined as a cloak that could be taken off. ‘A metaphor, I agree, but don’t treat metaphors lightly – they alter the speaker. The word comes, after all, from the Greek metaphorá, “to transfer”.’
From now on, Azur said, before they entered the classroom he would like everyone to strip themselves of this mantle. This included himself, as he too was inclined to wear one. ‘Think of it as an old coat, hang it on a peg. I’ve actually put one up right outside the door. You’re welcome to go and check.’
It took the students a minute to realize he was serious. Sujatha was the first on her feet. She strode across the classroom, opened the door and stepped into the hall. Her face brightened when she saw there really was a peg. Pretending she had a cloak on her shoulders, she peeled it off, hung it up and walked back in, triumphant. One by one the other students followed suit. Lastly, Professor Azur stepped out. Judging by the way he flailed his arms in the air, his cloak seemed to be rather heavy. After he freed himself of it, he returned to the classroom and clapped his hands. ‘Brilliant! Now that we’ve rid ourselves of our Egos, at least symbolically, let’s get started.’
‘Why did we do that?’ Bruno said, shaking his head.
‘Rituals are important, don’t underestimate them,’ said Azur. ‘Religions understand this well. But rituals don’t need to be religious. We’ll have our own shared practices in this seminar.’
He picked up a marker and scribbled on the board: GOD AS WORD.
‘Civilization as we define it today is about 6,000 years old. But human beings have been around for much longer – with skulls dating back 290 million years. What we know about ourselves is trivial compared with what we are yet to discover. Archaeological evidence makes it plain that for thousands of years, human beings thought of a god or gods in varying forms – a tree, an animal, a force of nature or a person. Then, somewhere along the flow of history, a leap of imagination occurred. From God as a tangible thing, humans switched to God as word. From that time hence nothing has been the same.’
Azur looked around, noticing Peri was the only one not taking notes. ‘Are you with me, Istanbul girl?’
Trying not to blush again under his scrutiny, Peri sat straight up in her chair. ‘Yes, sir.’
His gaze, open and trusting, lingered on her a few more seconds, as if he had expected her to say something different, and, in not doing so, she had disappointed him. He addressed his next remark to everyone, ‘If I were to inform you that behind this door God awaits, you can’t see Him – or Her – but you can hear His voice, what would you want Him to tell you? Not you as a generic representative of humankind, but you in person – one and only.’
‘I’d like to hear that he loves me,’ said Adam.
‘Yeah, he loves me and is happy to know that I love Him,’ said Kimber.
‘Love …’ several others repeated in their own words.
‘That He agrees with me – all this talk about Him is tripe,’ said Kevin.
‘Wait a minute, God can’t tell you that unless He exists,’ said Avi. ‘You’re contradicting yourself.’
Kevin frowned. ‘I’m just playing along with this silly game.’
Now it was Mona’s turn. ‘I’d like to hear from Allah that heaven is real … and that good people will be there and love and peace will prosper, inshallah.’
Azur turned to Peri – so swiftly she didn’t have time to avert her gaze and found it impossible to tear her eyes away from his.
‘What about you? What would you like God to tell you – Peri?’
&
nbsp; ‘I’d like Him to apologize,’ she said. She had no idea where that had come from, but made no attempt to hold back her words.
‘Apologize …’ Azur said. ‘For what?’
‘For all the injustice,’ replied Peri.
‘You mean the injustice done to you or to the world?’
‘Both,’ Peri said, more quietly than she’d intended.
Outside, a solitary leaf from the old oak tree twisted in the wind one last time and fell to the ground. Inside, the students were so attentive the silence was almost palpable.
Into the stillness, Azur said, ‘Justice! What a fancy word. Justice according to what or whom? The greatest bigots in history committed the gravest injustices in the name of justice.’
Azur’s tone hardened. ‘As you can see, two approaches to God have emerged from our discussion – we thank Kevin for playing along. The first associates God with love. In looking for God we are looking for love. Then we have Peri’s approach, looking for justice.’
Peri swallowed hard. She had opened up her heart and now Azur had taken a scalpel, cutting into it in front of everyone. If he had no tolerance for her views, why had he encouraged her to speak up in the first place? Besides, how could she be accused of potential fanaticism? She, her father’s daughter, the last thing she could be was a bigot!
Azur heard none of these silent protests. He pointed a finger at Peri. ‘You’d better be careful with that mighty “justice”! It’s quite possible that people with your ideas are making this world worse. All fanatics have one thing in common: they live in the past. As you do!’
The lecture ended soon after. Peri didn’t hear the last few minutes. Her mind was elsewhere, her head was pounding. She could not move or look at anyone for fear that her hurt would show. After everyone had left, including Azur, she found herself alone with Mona.
‘Hey, Peri,’ Mona said, putting a hand on Peri’s shoulder. ‘I know he was rude to you. Ignore him, honestly.’
Peri lowered her face, feeling tears well up. ‘I don’t understand. I had thought he was amazing. Shirin always said he was. But he is so …’