Bliss: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

medicine cabinet and picked out a bottle of Stilnox from among the countless medicines there. It would help him sleep for a while, at least. He was shaken by a storm of tears, worse even than before. Fortunately, Aysel was not awake to witness this crisis. It would have been impossible for him to have explained a fear he himself did not understand.
    Was he really unable to comprehend its reason? Didn’t he know the cause? “Don’t lie to yourself,” he advised.
    Aysel would certainly have suggested a practical solution: Go to a psychiatrist. “Get professional advice, you’ll feel much better. That’s their job, after all.” These and other clichés of the same sort were the advice she would give.
    But İrfan already knew what conclusions the psychiatrist would come to.
    The professor’s hopelessness did not stem from being unaware of his problem, but because he knew exactly what it was. He had struggled to understand his situation, finally grasping it fully after reading a book with the title of Sleeping Endymion . In classical Greek mythology, a young shepherd boy, Endymion, incurs the wrath of the gods by falling in love with a goddess, and the gods sentence him by making him decide on his own destiny. Unable to bear this punishment, he chooses to remain forever young, but forever asleep till the end of time.
    When he read this, İrfan realized that he, too, like Endymion, was terrified of perceiving his own fate. One’s fate should always remain a secret. No mortal is strong enough to know exactly what life holds, when an accident will occur, or in what guise death will arrive.
    This idea had completely upset İrfan’s ideas about all the things he had regarded as secure in life, which now became ropes to strangle him. He knew he would go on living in the same house, watch television from the same chair, eat at the same restaurants, meet the same people, say the same words … until one day, an ambulance would rush him through the streets he walked down every day to the same hospital he always went to, and there he would die. Or maybe, without being given time to reach the hospital, he would collapse, lifeless, on the Dunlopillo bed or one of the Ligne Roset armchairs. Those pieces of furniture he and Aysel had so happily picked out together were no longer objects of comfort or joy but appeared to him like makeshift coffins. He loved Aysel. That was not his problem, yet he could not endure the image of life as inevitably the same.
    During a conference in Paris, he had met a Canadian professor, a woman who had introduced him to the concept of metanoia, which had become a beacon in his mind in the same way that a lighthouse gives hope to the sea-tossed mariner. At the core of metanoia, which means “to transcend or exceed one’s self and be transported into another existence,” is the notion of “self.”
    It was the concept of self, in any case, which was the problem. What did “me,” “myself,” “I” really mean? To repeat one’s own name over and over is enough to feel separated from self. But how could one not become a stranger to the “self” one carried with one from birth to death, nor alienated from the “id”?
    The more the professor considered this question, the more deeply he recognized that most people do live with this alienation in every possible sense of the word. It is the rules of society and the material world that protect us from becoming estranged. Whenever we go astray, we sink back into the warm, relaxing waters of habit. After all, our guide is the familiar comfort of the armchair in which we always sit, the faucet we can turn on even with our eyes shut, and the imprint of our head on the pillow on waking up. In this sense, human beings are like dogs that urinate on trees, marking their territory in order to feel safe within the secure boundaries of their own smell. For human beings, familiar sensations and belongings constituted the formula for contentment.
    The great