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November 27, 2024
Rain and Mountains
Pages from a novelist’s notebook.
Rain and Mountains
Pages from a novelist’s notebook.
After spending his adolescent years imagining he would become a painter, Orhan Pamuk had a change of heart. “At 22, I killed the painter inside of me,” he recounts, “and began writing novels.” Since then he has gone on to write many novels, including The White Castle, My Name Is Red, Snow, and Nights of Plague, and win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet his love of visual art, and in particular landscapes, remained, and in 2008 he “walked into a stationery shop, bought two big bags of pencils, paints, and brushes, and began joyfully and timidly filling little sketchbooks with drawings and colors. The painter inside of me hadn’t died after all.” The following are from these sketchbooks, excerpted from Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks 2009–2022.
Excerpted with permission from Alfred A. Knopf. ©2024 Orhan Pamuk.
We cannot back down
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.
Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.
Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.
The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk is the author, most recently, of Istanbul and Snow. He was
awarded the 2005 Prix Medicis and won the International IMPAC Award in
2003 for My Name Is Red.