The best part of the "Journeys" issue
To a situated apologist, this passage near the end of Orhan Pamuk's story about his first passport.
Although my brother couldn't speak French, he was top in his class at counting backward by threes. The only thing I was good at in this school where I couldn't understand the language was silence. Just as you might struggle to wake up from a dream in which no one speaks, I fought not to go to school. As it did later, in other cities and other schools, my tendency to turn inward protected me from life's difficulties, but it also deprived me of life's riches. One day, my parents took my brother out of school, too. Putting our passports in our hands, they sent us away from Geneva, back to our grandmother in Istanbul.
I never used that passport again. Although it bore the words "Member of the Council of Europe," it was a reminder of my first failed European adventure, and such was the vehemence of my decision to turn inward that it would be another twenty-four years before I left Turkey again. When I was young, I always gazed with admiration and envy at those who acquired passports and traveled to Europe and beyond, but, despite the opportunities that were presented to me, I remained fearfully certain that it was my lot to sit in a corner in Istanbul and give myself over to the books that I hoped would one day make my name and complete me as a person. In those days, I believed that one could understand Europe through its greatest books.
