A story about people who can’t tell stories

“ Now, as you read what I have to say, please try and imagine the faces I describe to you. (For what is reading but the animating of a writer’s words on the silent film strip in our minds?) Project onto this silver screen a simple general store in eastern Anatolia. It’s a cold winter’s afternoon and the sky is already growing dark, and because business is slow, the barber across the way has left his apprentice to mind the store, and now he is here, sitting around the stove with his younger brother and a retired old man and a visitor who’s come to town, more for the company than to do the shopping. To pass the time, they make idle conversation, sharing stories about their days in the army and flipping through the newspaper and exchanging gossip, and they laugh from time to time, but sitting among them is one troubled man who speaks very little and has a hard time getting anyone to listen to him when he does: the barber’s brother. He has stories he wants to share, and jokes too, but much as he longs to tell them, he just doesn’t have the knack, he just can’t make himself shine. The one time all afternoon he tried to begin telling a story, the others cut him off without even realizing it. Please imagine the expression on this barber’s brother’s face when the others interrupted his story.
Now imagine an engagement party in the home of a westernized but not unusually wealthy Istanbul doctor. At one point, a handful of the guests who have invaded his house happen to find themselves in his daughter’s room, around a bed piled high with coats. Among them is a charming young girl and two men who long to impress her; one is not particularly good-looking or intelligent, but he’s chatty and gregarious. So the girl, like the older men in the room, listens to his stories; everyone present gives him their full attention. Now please try to picture the face of the other young man, who is so much brighter and more sensitive than his prattling friend but who can get no one to pay him any attention whatsoever.
Now please imagine three sisters who have all been married over the past two years; they’ve gathered at their mother’s house two months after the youngest sister’s wedding. The huge clock ticking on the wall and the impatient canary clucking in the cage tell us that we are in the home of a moderately successful merchant. As the four women sit sipping their tea in the leaden light of the wintry afternoon, the youngest daughter, who’s always been the vivacious one, tells such amusing stories about her two months of married life that her eldest and most beautiful sister, though she knows so much more about married life, sadly asks herself if perhaps there is something lacking in her husband, something missing in her life. So now please bring this melancholy face before your eyes.
Have you seen all these faces? Have you noticed that, in some strange way, they all look alike? Is there not something that makes them all resemble each other, an invisible thread that joins their souls? When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don’t know how to tell stories – who are mute, who can’t make themselves heard, who fade into the woodmark, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they’re back at home, who can never think of a story anyone else will find interesting – is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the sings of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can’t you? How many we are, how much anguish we all carry, and how helpless most of us are in the face of the world. "

(The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk)