---
title: "In Praise of Spring, or Night Meeting*"
canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/bahara-guzelleme-veya-gece-bulusmasi/"
date: "2017-03-05"
author: "Banu Uçak"
description: "After a hard winter, spring comes for the thirty-seventh time, with jasmine on the table and Atilla Ilhan's poem, and the question of how to meet it."
categories: ["essays"]
lang: "en"
---

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/3df0f-1taeghdsuu85dw23bvpobeq.CSJdm1_X_3AooM.webp "(I hope) the jasmines of my spring, whose scent you can catch from my writing")

This winter was very hard. I made new beginnings. Every new thing means old dreams pulled down, and the burden of raising others. Hopeful, and hard, both at once. It was a long, cold winter. It hid illnesses inside it. Among people close to me there were broken hearts, there were losses, there were those who were wronged. No one I love took a new baby into their arms this winter. Türkiye grew used to fears, to anxieties, to losses, and closed in on itself. The world, too, greyed a little. Perhaps it was always so, and I have only just seen it.

After the days of coats worn one on top of another, of hating traffic in every one of its moods, of rising in the dark to go to work while a full moon was still in the sky, today, suddenly, without warning, once again, spring came for me for the thirty-seventh time exactly. The flowers released their fragrance and called the bees in around them. And today I woke to life once more. After a long while, the wish to write woke in me too, with the spring.

For some time, I think, we have all been evolving together into a strange and irritating kind of human being. Perhaps it is the spirit of the age. Around me, the people who tie cause to effect in every matter of life have multiplied. You know the era. It is the era of understanding, of taking things apart, of being informed, of calling to account, of giving reasons. And knowledge is free, at a single key. There is a very short word in the dictionaries, and its meaning is close to being forgotten: "I don't know". I have not heard anyone say "I don't know" in a long while. From columns that run on for pages, how the brain works; from the television, the dark secrets of the universe; from pocket books, "Crime and Punishment"; from comics, "Das Kapital": it can all be learned with ease now, and consumed. At least one can master most things far enough to sauce a social life. The unknown, the mysteries, have disappeared. Let humankind map the genome and dream of colonies on other planets: it has still found no remedy for mortality, that ill-starred fate. And this mortal condition still makes losses, accidents and illnesses a natural part of life, however little we want to accept it. The illusion that we hold the control of our own lives shatters, every time, in the face of what befalls us. However we resist it, the truth life throws in our faces at regular intervals is that our control over what happens to us is far smaller than we think.

The other day, listening to a friend who has made a habit of making plans, of carrying life forward by decisions, and of slipping into a mild sort of depression when life does not flow on the path they drew, I thought of the story of my grandfather's death. He was spending his retirement with his grandchildren and his children, in a house inside a garden in Koşuyolu, when the cat snatched from the kitchen window the liver he had bought from the butcher. He flared up, had a heart attack, and left us at sixty, an age one would call young today.

The clearest form, in the face of death, of the obsession with cause and effect is "justification". I know that most people believe the hardships in a life are the greatest reason that those who fall into terrible illnesses are dropped into troubles without remedy. My grandfather died of a comic incident that might have come from a story by Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar. The popular view of the age holds responsible the heart that had weakened because it could not bear the hard youth he lived (or the rascal cat of Koşuyolu). If you ask me, it is neither. The deep wish, and the habit, growing in all of us, to control life (and of course the illusion) makes us ill, sometimes in spirit, and in the end, more often, in the body.

Humankind is strong enough to stay alive in the concentration camps, and, even diminished when it must be, to go on living after a child. So it is plain that what draws the direction of our lives is not what befalls us, but the meaning we give it.

I know this has been said for a long time already, and that an industry has even grown up around it. But I think that as long as we go on taking every scientific fact, every antioxidant, antidepressant, pilates, meditation and the like, marketed to tame the noise of modern life, as a prescription that will bring us what we want from life, and as long as we go on hunting for shortcuts that fit our plans, we will not slip free of disappointment either. It is a fact that dark feelings, sorrow and depression will deliver a person to every kind of illness. My intuition is this: the way out lies, at heart, in discovering the power of the road called life, which is the whole of what befalls us, to affect us and to change us. The system of thought which says that everything has an explainable side, and that the side is under our control, collapses right there. What you call life always examines you from the place where you are weak. And if you cannot stretch and change, cannot let go and leave, cannot begin again, cannot turn it over and look from underneath, the examination comes back, heavier. I know it is easier to write this than to do it. Yet I see clearly that those who live their preferences, and not their obligations, who meet what arrives on the road without insisting, out of stubbornness, on walking towards the goal, are the happier ones. The jasmine on my table, smelling so sweet, and the spring that on a Sunday evening made me write these lines by way of Atilla İlhan's poem "Night Meeting", which had caught in my mind for no reason, will come more times than I can count, whether I am here or not. What I will be able to decide is not how much I meet it, but only, and only, how.

Night Meeting\*

*You wait in Istinye, I am here*

*Inside me my loneliness, barking like a dog*

*I may not come, I cannot come, wait 5 minutes and go*

*Because I am here, I am in the dark*

*Because I cut my hand, the blood has made me faint*

*My wine is all sour, my water is cold*

*Were you not beside me, I love you*

*I may not come, I cannot come, wait 5 minutes and go*

*Can you cry without wetting your face*

*Have you ever telephoned at midnight*

*Did dark men ask for your identity*

*I am searching for your not being there*

*I may not come, I cannot come, wait 5 minutes and go*

*You seem a stranger, your myopic eyes narrowed*

*Whatever is mine, all of it frightens you*

*Whatever is yours, none of it is mine*

*Perhaps I am using my right to die*

*I may not come, I cannot come, wait 5 minutes and go*

*A. İlhan*