http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-neverending-nightmare-of-amanda-knox-20110627?page=1
I bought Robopocalypse in London…Gotta love the Robot uprising books…It’s really not far off.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/06/just-0-5-percent-of-cars-could-eliminate-traffic-jams/
and I’m currently reading “The Black Book” by Orphan Pamuk. translated from Turkish. So after work I was reading and found some nice words…
“He didn’t look like you at all,” said Belkin. Her eyes sparked dan-
gerously, just as they had done when Galip had first noticed her. “I
knew he never would. But we were in the same class. I could make him
look at me the same way you looked at Rüya. During the lunch break,
when Rüya and I were smoking cigarettes with the boys in Süstis
pudding shop, I’d see him passing by on the pavement, glancing anx-
iously at the happy crowd inside because he knew I was there in the
middle of it. On those sad autumn evenings when the sun sets so early
and the branches look so bare in the harsh light of the apartments, I
knew he’d be looking at them just like you did, but thinking of me, not Rüya”.
When they sat down to eat breakfast, sunlight was pouring in
through the curtains.
“I know how hard it is for a person to be himself,” said Belkis,
changing the subject as someone can only do who knows the other
person is obsessed with the same story. “But I didn’t know this until I
was in my thirties. Until then, I just thought of it simply as a question
of wanting to be someone else, as simple jealousy. At night, when I lay
on my back in bed, gazing at the shadows on the ceiling, I so longed to
be that other person, I thought I could slip off my own skin as easily as
a glove; my desire was so fierce that I thought it would ease me into
this other person’s skin and let me begin a new life. Sometimes, I’d be
sitting in a theatre, or standing in a crowded store, watching people
look right through me because they were so lost in their own worlds,
and my longing to become this person, to live her life, became so
intense, and the pain I felt was so overwhelming, that tears would
slip from my eyes”.
The woman picked up a thin slice of toast and scraped her clean
knife over its brittle surface, as if to butter it.
“Even after all these years, I still can’t understand why someone
would want to live someone else’s life and not their own,” she contin-
ued. “I can’t even explain why it was Rüya’s life that I wanted, rather than
someone else’s. All I can say is that for many years I saw it as an illness,
an illness I had to hide from the world. I was ashamed of the soul that
had contracted this disease, just as I was ashamed of the body con-
demned to carry it. My life was not real life but an imitation, and like all
imitations I thought of myself as a wretched and pitiful creature,
doomed to be forgotten. In those days, I thought the only was to
escape my despair was to imitate my “true self” more faithfully. At one
point, I considered changing schools, moving to a new neighborhood,
making new friends, but I knew that putting a distance between us
would only mean that I thought about you all the more. On stormy
autumn afternoons, I would sit listlessly in my armchair, watching
the raindrops on the window, for hour after hour; I’d be thinking of you:
Rüya and Galip. I’d go over whatever clues I had handy and imagine
what Rüya and Galip were doing at that moment; and if, after an hour
or two I had managed to convince myself that it was Rüya sitting in
that armchair in that dark room, this fearsome thought would
bring me exquisite pleasure”.
Because she kept rushing back and forth from the kitchen with tea
and toast as she spoke, smiling as easily as if she were telling an amu-
sing story about a distant acquaintance, Galip was not unduly troubled
by what she said.
“I continued to suffer from this illness until my husband’s death. I
still suffer from it, though i no longer see it as an illness; after my hus-
band died, when I was alone with my guilt, I finally accepted that no
one in this world can ever hope to be themselves. The overwhelming
regret I felt was but another variation of the same disease, and so was
my new passion: to relive the life I had shared with Nihat, relive it
exactly, but now as myself. One dark midnight, as I warned myself that
regret could ruin what time was left for me, I had an eerie thought: I had
not been myself during the first half of my life because I wanted to be
someone else, and now I was going to spend the second half of my life
being someone who regretted all those years she had spent not
being herself. I couldn’t help but laugh, and when I did the terror and
misery I had thought to be my past and my future became a fate I
shared with everyone, and a fate I had no need to dwell on. For my now
I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of us can ever hope
to be ourselves: that the troubled old man standing in that long line,
waiting for the bus – he too had ghosts living inside him, ghosts of the
‘real’ people he once longed to become. That rosy cheeked mother
who’s taken her children to the park on a winter’s morning to soak in
some sunlight – she too has sacrificed herself, she too is a copy of
some other mother. The melancholy men straggling out of the movie the-
aters, the wretches I saw roaming along crowded avenues or fidgeting
in  noisy coffeehouses – they too are haunted day and night by the
ghosts of the ‘true selves’ they longed to become”.
They were still sitting at the breakfast table, smoking cigarettes. the
room was warm, and as the woman spoke, Galip felt waves of sleep
rolling over him with promises of innocence . Relax, they said this is
only a dream. When he asked if he could stretch out on the divan next
to the radiator for a quick nap, Belkin began to tell him the story of the
crown prince; it was, she said, “pertinent to “everything we’ve been dis-
cussing”.
Yes, once upon a time there lived a prince who’d discovered that
there was one question in life that mattered more than any other: To be
or not to be oneself – but before Galip could conjure up the story, he
could feel himself turning into someone else, and then turn into someone
else who fell asleep.
