The Source of Contentment

I'm reading 'My Name is Red' by Orhan Pamuk. This is the English translation, my Türkçe is nowhere near good enough to read the original. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for this book, justifiably so, it's a beautifully written historical mystery book, its inspiring and haunting with thickly layered themes and perspectives, and takes place in Istanbul in the same neighborhoods where I've spent a few weeks and its answering a question for me - 'What was this place like in the days of the Sultanate?' I've been to many of the locations that this book takes place in, and this is making the book so real in my mind that I feel as if I can hear the sounds of the street vendors hawking their wares.

If you haven't read this book I highly recommend it. 'My Name is Red' is one of the few books I've read recently that absolutely envelopes you with prose and imagery and transports you into a poetic world of the authors creation.

There is a parable being related by a master illustrator as they examine books of illustrations in the treasury of the Sultan's Palace - it made me laugh and stop and think about it for a long while. Below is the story which I have shamelessly typed up from the book - the master is relating this story to two others who are looking at an illustration with him:

"This is the work of Lütfi of Bukhara whose ill-temper and belligerence caused him to leave each of his illustrations half-finished; he fought with every shah and khan claiming that they understood nothing of painting, and he never remained in one city for long. This great master went from one shah's palace to another, from city to city, quarreling all the way, never able to find a ruler whose book was deserving of his talents, until he ended up in the workshop of an inconsequential chieftain who ruled over nothing but bare mountaintops. Claiming that 'the khan's dominions might be small, but he knows painting!', he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life there. Whether he ever knew that this inconsequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of conjecture and source of humor."