Berkeley Asian Americans; Orhan Pamuk as a writing son
Little Asia on the Hill is a fascinating NYT article about the huge number of Asian-American students on the Berkeley campus.
This morning, I read Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: My Father's Suitcase, an essay that stirred up deep emotional wells in me as a writer and a son. A choice quote:
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it
is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The
lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to
have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the
patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I
understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about
the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same
passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could
re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that
I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a
writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a
story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise
up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to
this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of
inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on
others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer
feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his
dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is
only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal
to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to
build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I
am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and
pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination
but from another power, which had found them and generously presented
them to me.
Posted by rdhyee at January 15, 2007 10:21 PM