"I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf."

Orhan Pamuk delivered his Nobel Prize lecture yesterday at the Swedish Academy.

Although I detest sentences that begin, "The starting point of true literature ...," there's something to this passage:

The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other peoples' stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. ... The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.

At the center of the lecture is the battered old suitcase in which Pamuk's father kept his own writing, a suitcase Pamuk's father then gave to his son, and the reflections on writers and writing to which that suitcase crammed with papers inspired Pamuk. I won't spoil the lecture for you by revealing more about the events that Pamuk so simply and poignantly recalls in it, but I will quote one more section at length:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

[Update: J. E. Luebering, at the Brittanica Blog has a very sensitive and well-written post, "Pamuk and the World Without Center," on the extent to which Pamuk's Nobel remarks should be read through the lens of politics. (Luebering says not so much.) I find it vaguely ethnocentric and patronizing that the discussion of Pamuk's Nobel should so often focus to such an extent on its political ramifications, thereby effectively ignoring the literary qualities that have made Pamuk a worthy recipient of the Prize.]