How much person can love another person? This question may blossom into colorful responses from majority of people as they live the quest of this question every day. But how much a person can love a town or city in which he/she lived, lives and will continue to live on.
This love is not out of obsession, dependence, unavoidable affiliation or uncompromising cultural bondage. This love must be generated from the deepest corners of our affection towards what that town really stands for.
Orhan Pamuk in his ‘Istanbul: Memoirs and The City’ articulates and has narrated this personal touch in a seemingly universal way which can be felt about every historic city unless and until we really try to appreciate the idea that we can love a town, beyond the pleasure and melancholy of relations.
Pamuk says, “If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorous sings of life, pleasure and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from Bosphorous.”
When we tolerate the immense torrent of warm sprinkles of sea and cold breeze coming from across the old and new cross-sections of Istanbul it is impossible to conceal what Orhan further says about the crucial place of a city in his life, true about everybody else`s personal life.
He says, “Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorous and Istanbul`s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.”
The eternal hope embedded in Orhan`s words eventually sum up: “Life can`t be all that bad, I`d think from time to time, whatever happens, I can always take a walk along the Bosphorous.”
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