from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

“A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade. When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.”

” ‘You know the best thing about what you wrote?’ the boy went on, and Tomas could see the effort it cost him to speak. ‘Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what’s good and what’s evil, something we’re beginning to lose. We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn’t love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.’ “

  -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

For You a Thousand Times Over…

I just finished reading “The Kite Runner”. All I can say about this book is it is just very beautifully written, amazing, the story, the style everything. I remember having watery eyes and holding back my tears while reading it. I hadn’t been reading books for a while as I was quite busy at school and then I started this book last week but it didn’t even take me a week to finish it. I was getting more and more curious on every single page I was reading. With this book, I, once more, remembered how disgusting, inhumane wars, violence and some people are…

Very highly recommended to those who love reading heart-wrenching stories!!

“He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ”For you a thousand times over!” he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.”

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft… When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”

“It’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’t know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.”

“I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.”

“One day, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to The Magnificent Seven and asked me if I had seen it. “Yes, thirteen times,” I said. “Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert Vaughn.” He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda. “Thanks a lot, man,” he said, shaking his head and muttering something as he walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.
In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba’s friends—second and third cousins milling in and out of the house—wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyab and fulfill his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?
Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.”

“And one more thing, General Sahib,” I said. “You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab.”

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner…

From “To Kill a Mockingbird” (2)

“I think I’ll be a clown when I get grown,” said Dill.

Jem and I stopped in our tracks.

“Yes sir, a clown,” he said. “There isn’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.”

“You got it backwards, Dill,” said Jem. “Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.”

“Well I’m gonna be a new kind of clown. I’m gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks. Just looka yonder,” he pointed. “Every one of ’em oughta be ridin’ broomsticks. Aunt Rachel already does.”

Miss Stephanie and Miss Rachel were waving wildly at us, in a way that did not give the lie to Dill’s observation.

*******

“Well, coming out of the courthouse that night Miss Gates was-she was goin’ down the steps in front of us, you musta not seen her-she was talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford. I heard her say it’s time for somebody taught ’em a lesson, they were gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home-”

From “To Kill a Mockingbird”

…”That ain’ t right, Miss Maudie. You are the best lady I know.”

Miss Maudie grinned. “Thank you ma’am. Thing is, foot-washers think women are a sin by definition. They take the bible literally, you know.”

“Is that why Mr. Arthur stays in the house, to keep away from women?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me. Looks like if Mr. Arthur was hankerin’ after heaven he’d come out on the porch at least. Atticus says God’s loving folks like you love yourself-“

Miss Maudie stopped rocking, and her voice hardened. “You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of – oh, of your father.”

…When he gave us our air-rifles Atticus wouldn’t teach us to shoot. Uncle Jack instructed us in the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn’t interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather she shot at tin cans at the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 

“That was the only time I ever heard Atticus it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. 

“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

-Harper Lee…

Çakıcı’nın İlk Kurşunu

drawn by Rukiye Uçar

“Tabiat, güzelliği bu halka, bu iklime vermişti. Levent boylar, penbe beyaz tenler, narin güzel vücutlar, zeybeğin cesaretiyle rekabet eden güzelliğini de teşkil ediyordu. Bu parlak semanın altında güneşin bile yakmaya kıyamadığı ve hatta yakamadığı penbe beyaz vücutlar, birer sülün gibi kayarken, esatirden birer ilahe şeklinde dalgalana dalgalana kaybolurlar, arkalarından bakan gözlere saatlerce hayallerini arattırırlardı. *Güzelliğin ve yiğitliğin, bu iklimin yarattığı bu iki fevkaladelik, zeybeklerde, zeybekler arasında toplanmıştı.

Bunların güzelliği, ihtiyar Abdülhamit’in iştiha ile sakalını titreten bir destan olmuştu. Hatta bir aralık güzelliğinin şöhretini işittiği bir kızı saraya aldırtmak üzere yaverini göndermiş, fakat Çakıcı’nın zamanında yetişmesi, zeybek kızını saraya düşmek zilletinden kurtarmıştı. Efe, karşısında kordonları ile titreyen Abdülhamit’in yaverine güzel bir ders vermiş, bir zeybek kızının ne demek olduğunu anlatmıştı:

-Git padişahına anlat, zeybek, kızını değil, beslediği köpeğini bile satmaz. Zeybek için evlat, fakir de olsa canından daha kıymetlidir. Çerkeslerin esir pazarı tükendi mi ki padişah dediğin herif gözünü zeybek kızlarına çevirdi? Zeybeklerden bu kadar hoşlanıyorsa, beslemek için beş on tane ihtiyar, sakat zeybek kadın gönderelim, fakat kız, asla… Haydi var da anlatıver…”

-Sabahattin Ali

*Bu cümlede neden böyle bir düşüklük var bilmiyorum. Asıl kaynağından olduğu gibi alıntıdır.

İstanbul Kırmızısı (The Red of Istanbul)

…Ama mutlu oldu biliyorum. Mutlu bir kadın oldu çünkü sevmeyi bildi. Aşk karşısında hiç geri adım atmadı. Bunu hala yinelemeyi sürdürüyor: sevmek gerekir, sevme cesaretini göstermek gerekir.

Yokluğuna, yalanlarına, şiddetine karşın babamı sevdi. İlk kocasını, ablam Filiz’in babasını da çok sevmişti. Yakışıklı, çok yakışıklı; Clark Gable bıyıklı, bakışları canlı biriydi. Onu sonsuz bir sevgiyle sevdi ve aşkı için evlendi. Sonra aşk uçtu gitti. Birkaç yıl önce o öldüğünde bana şöyle dedi: “Bugün benim için çok hüzünlü bir gün. İlk kocam öldü, bir parçam sonsuza dek yok oldu.”

“Ama anne sen ondan boşanmıştın, o sana ihanet etmişti. Hem sonra babamla evlendin. Onu hala sevdiğine inandırmak mı istiyorsun beni?”

Bana hayretle baktı ve neredeyse hayal kırıklığı ile yanıtladı: “Ama nasıl olur, bir film yönetmenisin, aşkı anlatıyorsun ve şimdi insanın aynı anda iki kişiyi sevebilmesine şaşırıyorsun. Aşk ömürlüktür.”

Annem hakkında bilmediğim ne çok şey var…

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

…Kadına her şeyden daha çok “kendi” İstanbul’unu anlatıyor. Lüks oteller ve alışveriş merkezleri yapmak için parkları ve tarihi yapıları yok etmeye çalışanlardan; baskıcı bir zihniyetle din ya da başka şeyler adına başkalarının hayatına müdahale edenlerin, kişisel özgürlüklere, tercihlere karışanların yarattıkları korkudan; gençlerin direnme arzusundan, onların, duvara renkli bir grafiti çizerek bile olsa sergiledikleri protestolardan söz ediyor. Ona terk edilmiş bir elektrik santralinin artık sanat merkezi olduğunu söylerken gözleri ışıldıyor.

Anna, şu ana dek tanıdığı, kendine anlatılan İstanbul’un bu olmadığını fark ediyor.

“Bir askerin adını taşıyorsun Murat,” diyerek onun sözünü kesiyor kadın. Ne ilgisi var şimdi. Hiç. Zaten artık hayatında mantıklı hiçbir şey yok; sadece bunu söylemek geliyor içinden, o kadar. Gioacchino Murat; cesur general: işte dedesinin anlattığı öykülerden biri daha. Günün birinde ona bir tarih kitabından Murat’ın gençlik resmini göstermişti: gururlu, sırma kordonlarla ve madalyalarla bezenmiş kırmızı-beyaz ceketli, neredeyse omuzlarına dökülen siyah bukleli saçlı.

“Bir Fransız askeriydi, sonra general oldu; Napoleon Bonaparte’ın kız kardeşiyle evlendi ve Napoli kralı oldu. Hiç duymamış mıydın? Gioacchino Murat.”

Kendi siyah bukleleri de dağınık ve asi olan genç gülüyor: “Duymamıştım. Murat bizde de çok yaygın bir addır, bir sultanın, daha doğrusu Osmanlı hanedanından bazı sultanların da adıdır. Sizin Fransızlarla hiç ilgisi yok.”

“Dedem bana ne anlatırdı biliyor musun? Tehlikeyi o denli küçümsermiş ki, kanlı bir çarpışmadan sonra bir başka general şu açıklamada bulunmuş: ‘Murat biraz daha az cesur, biraz daha sağduyulu olsa keşke.’ Ve tutsak edilip Calabria’da kurşuna dizileceği zaman son sözleri şunlar olmuş: ‘Yüzümü zedelemeyin, yüreğimden vurun; ateş!'”

Dedesi. Ona çiçeklerin, maceraperest kadınların ama aynı zamanda savaşların ve cesaretin öykülerini anlatırdı…

-Ferzan Özpetek