2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is visiting Toronto now.
He had a communication session with readers at Harbourfront Center today.
Good to have him in the city. Welcome Orhan!
....
What am I doing in this world? Ka asked himself. How miserable these snowflakes look from this perspective, how miserable my life is. A man lives his life, and then he falls apart and soon there is nothing left. Ka felt as if half his soul had just abandoned him but still the other half remained; he still had love in him. Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself heart and soul to the melancholy course on which his life was set. His father had a certain smell after shaving, and now this smell came back to him. He thought of his mother making breakfast, her feet aching inside her slippers on the cold kitchen floor; he had a vision of a hairbrush; he remembered his mother giving him sugary pink syrup when he woke up coughing in the night, he felt the spoon in his mouth, and as he gave his mind over to all the other little things that make up a life and realized how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake....
So it was that Ka heard the call from deep inside of him: the call he heard only at moments of inspiration, the only sound that could ever make him happy, the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years, a poem was coming to him; although he had yet to hear the words, he knew it was already written; even as it waited in its hiding place, it radiated the power and beauty of destiny. Ka's heart rejoiced. He told the three youths he had to leave them and hurried away through the snow, thinking all the while of the poem he would write when he was back at the hotel.
Chapter Nine: Are You an Atheist?
A NONBELIEVER WHO DOES
NOT WANT TO KILL HIMSELF.
Orhan Pamuk 'Snow'
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