There
are crimes of hate and crimes of love. This hatred and this desire to suffer lie
profoundly at the heart of my epoch. In the end I do not hate mankind, but my
literary creativity is related to the pscychology here described. I desire to
suffer. I vented much abhorence. And I brandished the absolute like a club.
If my mental development differs from that of other members of my generation or any other generation seeking the absolute, it is because of it’s inconclusiveness. Kierkegaard also sought, and his search is one of the most far-reaching. But surely his findings were a foregone conclusion. Tolstoy’s search also offends by it’s shocking conclusiveness and the absurdity of the conclusion. Nietzsche’s search was probably the most rigorous of all. He searched heaven and hell, which is more than a mortal can stand; he emerged from his campaigns neither a Dionysus nor a Christ but an imbecile and a paralytic. I fight unremittingly. I champion first this absolute, then that, then the other. My frequent changes, my perpetual misgivings, keep me in a state of tension-and high vitality- to the end. My failure to be saved is my salvation. And the final irony is that in some strange fashion I seem to know it. The absolute is for me a flag to wave and a goal that must never be reached. The absolute for me is relative.
The higher fantasy has a greater
reality than this actuality. These banal accidents of existence are not
essential life. My whole life is a dream. I started writing because I fell out
of love, for she was not able to touch my heart. I was shocked and felt myself
on top of the world, at the edge, when for
the first time I realised that I fell in love with life without even touching
the death. I am afraid of falling out of
life and off the world. I am afraid of being dead and awaken.
Cengiz
Erdem.