Orhan Pamuk spoke tonight for SAL to a packed house at Benaroya Hall. I was among the youngest in the room, even in my mid-thirties. In the seat next to me, an old man wheezed and the grating of the air as it scraped over what must have been serrated membranes inside his nose at times drowned out the Turkish man speaking into the microphone on the stage. This reading man, on his own, difficult to understand from his jagged accent and allegro pace, and the surprisingly echoey PA system. As I recall, something like this happened the last time I went to a SAL lecture. Coincidence?

The readings prelude a healthy-sized Q&A. The short, important woman asking the questions made the first one about the congressional resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide. Pamuk remarked that a smart journalist saves the more political questions for later, instead asking smaller ones to ease in. The woman had a lot of cheek. She said, "I'm not a journalist."

I liked his answer to the question. He said that the issue is a moral one and it is important that Turkish people be able to speak about it openly. He said that recently the issue has become political on the international stage but that is not the true nature of the issue. He added, the issue is being used as a political strong arm for a different purpose. And he re-asserted that the issue is a moral one that Turkish people should be able to discuss openly and among themselves.

Someone asked him what book made him feel most happy, and I thought this a difficult question to answer. I don't think I've read a book that I liked that made me happy. He said the ceaseless attention to detail of Proust's writing made him feel at ease with himself and the world. He said that that kind of detail about all the things in the world, the things in people's lives, and people's experience of those things and themselves made him feel that he was OK.

Andrew and I tried to meet to get a bite of dinner beforehand, but it is surprisingly difficult to procure dinner on a Monday night. We met in the Market and then abandoned the Market by way of that old cobblestone ramp that descends through concrete strata and endures a bend to descend farther to fall even below the basements of the buildings that seem to form the ground for the street. Shallow troughs of water glistened in the long-weathered stones, rivulets in progress that made a kind of mirrored footpath. This is my favorite scape in the city, revenant of ancient towns and of the new ones so jammed with people that the concrete just gets all balled up in them.

After the lecture, I walked home in a mist made impotent by a surprising lack of wind. But now I hear the windows unbalanced in their frames and the occasional brunt and whiffle. It sounds like someone trying hard to blow out a candle.