I want to go where Europe and Asia share a kiss

Doesn't the map below seem to portray Europe extending its elephant-trunk like lips to plant a big wet one on Asia's?

Welcome to the Bosphorus, whose waters separate the Eurasian lips.

[The] strait is 31 km (17 nmi) long, with a width of 3,329 m (1.798 nmi) at the northern entrance and 2,826 m (1.526 nmi) at the southern entrance. Its maximum width is 3,420 m (1.85 nmi) ... and minimum width 700 m  ...

Not even two miles separating the land areas.  Is it any surprise then that Turkey has a tough time figuring out whether it is an European country or an Asian one!

I started thinking about this when more than a couple of my regular news feeds led me to the same note by the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk.  As the sentences picked up speed there, I was left completely lost in the dust clouds of my ignorance.  That essay was the latest reminder of how I know not any damn thing!  No wonder Pamuk is a Nobel laureate, eh!

Orhan Pamuk's essay is about the Bosphorus, which, for him, is practically his backyard.  He opens his essay with a question: "Did you know that the Bosphorus is drying up?"

No, I had no idea.  But, am I surprised?  Nope.  Nothing is surprising anymore, thanks all the constant stream of reports on global climate changes.

Anyway, Pamuk writes:

The Black Sea, we are told, is getting warmer, the Mediterranean colder. As their waters continue to empty into the great caves whose gaping holes lie in wait under the seabed, the same tectonic movements have caused Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Bosphorus to rise. After one of the last remaining Bosphorus fishermen told me how his boat had run aground in a place he had once had to throw in an anchor on a chain as long as a minaret, he asked, Isn’t our prime minister at all interested in knowing why?
I didn’t have an answer for him. All I know is that the water is drying up faster than ever, and soon no water will be left. What is beyond doubt is that the heavenly place we once knew as the Bosphorus will soon become a pitch-black bog, glistening with muddy shipwrecks baring their shiny teeth like ghosts.

If that doesn't depress you, then I bet you live in one of those alternate realities!

I hope I am able to get there soon enough because if things get bad, then:

Those seaside cafés where balloon and wafer halvah vendors once wandered among us? No longer shall we sit there of an evening to feast our eyes on naval fireworks, instead, we’ll watch the blood-red fireballs of exploding mines that carry with them the shattered remains of the curious children who set them off.

Hmmm ...

I suppose I have always been a fan of Pamuk's observations, from the little that I have read.  One of the best was a short story that I read a couple of years ago in the New Yorker.  (I tracked it down; click here.)  It was awesome!

Over the years, I have read some of his non-fiction writing as well, and liked his thoughts on whether he is a Turkish writer or a global writer.  I liked this interview in the old newspaper from the country where I was born and had even bookmarked it!  Pamuk says:

When I began writing, no one cared about Turkey, no one knew about Turkey. In 1985 I went to America for two years and began to write The Black Book around then. Finding that my voice was getting stronger, I really remember thinking, ‘my God these Latin American writers are so lucky, who cares about Turkish writers or Middle Eastern writers or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani writers?’ That’s what I thought then. But the situation has changed in 25 years and during that change my books boomed, I am happy to say that. There are political reasons, cultural reasons, history, all of which changed the world. And now I would say that a big writer from Turkey or the Middle East or India is more visible. Salman Rushdie, for example, was visible in 1981. It all began after that.

We live in a wonderful world where we are able to read works from countries that we might perhaps never even visit.  Imagine how shortchanged we would be in a world that was, say, a couple of centuries ago!  Our lives are so much richer thanks to the world literature that is now literally at our fingertips!  Pamuk adds:

I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.

As the hip-hop generation says, you da man!

Now, if only I could get on a plane to Istanbul. No, to Constantinople. No, to Istanbul :)