The happiest moment of my life

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything turned out differently? Yes, if I had recognized this instant of perfect happiness, I would have held it fast and never let it slip away. It took a few seconds, perhaps, for that luminous state to enfold me, suffusing me with the deepest peace, but it seemed to last hours, even years.

~

As much as I wanted to dismiss the feeling as ordinary, I could not deny the startling truth that when looking at Füsun, I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me. I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply.

~

Having become - with the passage of time - the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage over those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of "first love", for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us.

~

It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure. Already, every evening, before going to bed, I would take the raki from the refrigerator and gaze out the window as I drank a glass alone in silence. Our apartment was at the top of a tall building opposite Tesvikiye Mosque, and our bedroom windows looked out on many other families' bedrooms that resembled ours; since childhood I had found strange comfort in going to my dark bedroom to look into other people's apartments.

~

Let me confess that my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn't. Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanour.

"I love you very much, too".

Though I was being utterly sincere, my words were neither as forceful nor as truthful as hers. She'd said it first.

~

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden moment "now", even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, or more so.

But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel,we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospective, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, just as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.

ORHAN PAMUK "THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE"