Portrait of a Turkish Novelist as Prisoner
"... I encounter with some embarrassment flickers of hope and dreams beneath my pessimism. A man freezing inside cannot abandon hope and its warm glow. I daydream in the cell: I leave the prison, a deep breath, the first embrace, words of joy, the smell of happiness and a wide sky above.
As I dream, three men with ties loosened out of boredom deliberate my destiny. Perhaps they have already made their decision. I suddenly remember a passage from my novel “Like a Sword Wound,” which is set in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. One of my characters is arrested and he is in a room waiting for the verdict.
I wrote of him: “The gap between the moment that a person’s destiny changed and the moment the person realized this seemed to him to be the most tragic and frightening aspect of life. The future became clear, but the person continued to wait for another future with other expectations and dreams without realizing that the future had already been determined. The ignorance during that wait was horrible and to him was humanity’s greatest weakness.”
More: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/ahmet-altan-turkey-prison.html?action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Opinion
Note: Ahmet Altan, a novelist and former newspaper editor, was sentenced by a Turkish court on February 16 to life imprisonment without parole for involvement in a 2015 attempted coup.
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