I have always wanted to love the same woman …
((This article is not mine. It belongs to Ahmet Altan whom I love dearly. I just translated and put a bit of my soul into it. Good readings :)(if anyone does))
Even if men, greedily look at all women’s breasts, cannot take their eyes off the swinging hips of all women, and feel a wild desire to make love to all the women of the earth, somewhere deep inside lies the desire to, set the table with the woman they love in their small watered courtyard in front of their homes and have a meal together laughing, joke with her, love her trustfully, to miss the body of the same woman every night, to enjoy the amazement of the same woman every night.
Life sometimes flows on us like a river from the flame. All words, all beliefs ignite in front of our eyes, blackening and drying up in the fire.
There is no branch left for us to hold on to, we have nobody to turn to.
We disbelieve the future.
Neither philosophical trust in God, nor determined optimism, nor crusader faith can find a corner to attach in our soul.
We fade, we get lonely, we get desolate.
Worry replaces hope.
We just stand aghast.
We are trying to find out why there is so much death, why it is so difficult to live.
Rising like a hellish vapour, this terrible, meaningless and intensifying enmity, which displays that, life itself is hateful to us, it drives us to a rush that we will penetrate all the particles of our existence and fall like a rotten fruit from the tree of humanity to which we belong.
As if the weather is accompanying this tediousness and depression.
The sky, flows down to our throats like water boiled in black cauldrons.
At times like this, I want to escape, run away.
I ran away, not because of the brutality of the people, the murder, the war.
I am sick of tiresome lack of intelligence that resembles this damp-smelling air that fills my lungs like melted mercury, disgusting me those who are incapable of creating life flying in clouds like death hawks.
Then I run to intelligence, creativity, and emotions that make human beings human, grace, the radiance of the human mind that makes even the God proud.
I take refuge in the intelligence of human beings to get rid of human beings’ idiocy.
I run across books, lines, sentences, words in that holy refuge.
In those sentences, from wars, conflicts and deaths, and although most of those events were forgotten, those words describing human emotions have survived.
Gustav Flaubert had experienced the post-Napoleonic unrests, the 1848 uprising, the pains of Europe’s attempting to reshape, the shocks of world history’s preparation for a great upheaval, the world was cracking in pain like a seed ready to break, but, strangely, humanity’s collective memory remembers Madame Bovary’s pain more than the suffering of those times.
Why did the suffering of a single “imaginary” woman leave a deeper mark in the mind of man than the suffering of millions?
The causes of the crowds’ suffering in every period varied, their conditions varied, their forms varied, the human mind and foolishness were changing, but whatever the circumstances were, the pain of a “single woman” did not change because.
Emma Bovary wanted to spend a life like in the novels she read.
She wanted a deep passion, a true love.
Is there a woman who doesn’t want this?
And, she was striking at the insensitivity and carelessness of men.
Is there a woman who is not striking?
He was struggling to get rid of this.
Is there a woman who is not struggling?
The more he struggled, the more he suffered.
Is there a woman who does not suffer pain while attempting?
That novel tells about grief, loneliness, despair that has been repeated for thousands of years, the society’s isolation and punishment of a woman who follows her dreams.
Furthermore, this man who wrote one of humanity’s most memorable books was criticized, arrested, and put on a trial for his book.
He felt all alone.
In a letter to his friend Turgenev, he wrote, “If you know how lonely I am! Who is there to talk to? Who in our poor country still cares about literature? Perhaps only one person? Myself! The wreck of a lost country and the ancient fossil of romanticism.”
The reason why he felt so lonely while living in the same country, at the same time as the literary giants like Balzac and Hugo, was probably because people were sceptical of literature and emotions because they thought that the political turmoil of that time was “permanent and real”, not the “permanent” feelings of Madame Bovary.
Flaubert described the boyish cliché of men that led Madame Bovary to a disaster in a short speech in his novel “Sentimental Education.’’ :
One of the men said:
- The things that appeal to you in a woman are things that make her think in terms of thought: For instance, breasts, hair …
The quiet one among them asked the older one while arguing like that:
“- You should leave the brunette and switch to blonde. Do you agree, Father Dussardier?’’
Dussardier did not answer; they all pressed him to find out which kind of women he liked.
- Well, let me tell you, he said angrily, I always wanted to love the same woman.
He said this in such a way that they all fell silent for a moment; some were so shocked by this naivety, and some found their secret aspirations in these words.
I always want to love the same woman.
If there is a man who will not stop and think when he reads this sentence, few are.
Every man will stop and think when he reads this; just a few won’t.
The speech of the crowd of men that Flaubert wrote can actually be regardable as a single man speaking to himself; because underneath these very tasteful, ordinary and “masculine” demands of men with the desire for “breasts, hair” and who want to touch as many female bodies as possible, lies a deeply hidden “Madame Bovary”, “I always wanted to love the same woman.” saying.
If you can sort out the hard and boring shells of this crowd of men who consider fighting, killing, political power, “breasts and hair” more important than love, at the bottom you will find a “Madame Bovary” that terrifies them all.
Like women, men miss romance and love.
Since they are much more scared of missing, being abandoned and being deceived than women, since they are less resilient and weak than women in the face of the pain of being deceived, they try to reject and mock these feelings because they do not have “emotional education” that will develop spiritual agility to miss.
For him, they wander like a rhino in which butterflies fly.
It was not only women who engraved Madame Bovary into the collective memory of humankind, but men too helped her engrave in the mind of humankind.
They also understood that woman.
They also found something of themselves in her.
Maybe that’s why when they asked, “Who is Madame Bovary?” Flaubert replied, “I am.”
If they were not so fearful of being cheated, of being belittled for loving someone, of losing their power, if they were not so beware of that others would pity on them if like they had pity on Madame Bovary, Monsieur Bovary would also have been seen.
Their fears, far greater than women’s, make men ordinary and rude.
Go to the taverns in the middle of the night, when the cigarette smoke is intense, and the men are preparing to surrender to the slackness of drunkenness, you will see men with a strange sadness in their eyes that have begun to become dry, a crack is heard in their bifurcated smashing voices, with an old song they first become silent and then start to tell an unforgettable lover.
They loved her.
They have always loved the same woman.
They have always had the same dream in them; they have constantly wished for a love like the books they never read.
Even if men, greedily look at all women’s breasts, cannot take their eyes off the swinging hips of all women, and feel a wild desire to make love to all the women of the earth, somewhere deep inside lies the desire to, set the table with the woman they love in their small watered courtyard in front of their homes and have a meal together laughing, joke with her, love her trustfully, to miss the body of the same woman every night, to enjoy the amazement of the same woman every night.
We always want to love the same woman.
We always love the same woman.
We just do not have the power to say this, accept it, and carry this truth.
At heart, all the men are Monsieur Bovary whose novels have not been written.
Perhaps, they fight so to forget this, to move away from this truth, they get wild, go foolish, turn into malefactor.
Monsieur Bovary’s are fighting again.
They are killing each other.
If you approach both the dead and those who killed, and look at their souls, you will hear a voice saying “I always want to love the same woman.”
A distant voice from deep down.
A fragile, nervous voice.
A voice that is tried to be suppressed with the sounds of bullets.
Women want a life like a novel.
Men, always loving the same woman …
Madame Bovary’s novels are written.
Monsieur Bovary’s are killed in battles.
And when old songs are played in taverns, the same sentence is expressed in different ways and tones.
“I always want to love the same woman.”
