HIM

We´re all waiting for Him. We´ve all been waiting for Him for centuries. Wherever our dreams take us - onto the airplane we see pictured in that same paper, into a well-lit room, there to fall into the arms of a beautiful woman - it is Him we seek. We long for Him as we stroll along muddy pavements, laden with groceries wrapped in newspapers that a hundred pairs of eyes have scanned, with plastic bags that make all the apples inside them smell synthetic, with string bags that leave purple stains on our fingers. We wait for Him as we sit in movie theaters watching hairy men breaking bottles on a Saturday night and world beauties embarking on breathtaking adventures ; we seek Him as we walk home from the brothels that have succeeded only in making us feel lonelier than before, as we thank our neighbour for inviting us over to hear the radio play, even though we didn´t hear a word of it because his noisy children refused to go to bed. Some of us believe it will be in the back streets - in a lonely corner where darkness has reigned ever since louts with slingshots shattered the streetlamps - that He will make His first appearance ; others of us believe it will be in front of one of those impious shops where they sell lottery tickets, girlie magazines, toys, tobacco, condoms, and untold quantities of useless trinkets. But wherever He ultimately chooses to reveal Himself, be it in the restaurant kitchens where little children mold ground meat into meatballs for twelve hours a day, or a movie theater where thousands of eyes unite in longing to become a single eye, or a green hill sitting where shepherds as pure as angels fall under the spell of the cypresses swaying in the graveyard, we are agreed at least that when the endless wait is over, when eternity vanishes in the blinking of an eye, those of us who are lucky enough to see Him first will recognise Him immediately and know, too, that deliverance is nigh.

But here´s the surprising thing : Though we all await His coming, and though many claim to have foreseen it, no one - and I am speaking now of all humanity, from my dear reader Mehmet Yilmaz, who once described a vision that came to him while sitting in his home in remotest Anatolia, to the great Ibn´Arabi, who recounts being visited by the same vision seven hundred years earlier in The Phoenix ; from the philosopher al-Kindi, who dreamed that He, and all those He had saved, would take Constantinople from the Christians, to the salesgirl who sees Him in her daydreams as she sits surrounded by bobbins, buttons, and nylon stockings in a dry-goods store in a Beyoglu back street, centuries after al-Kindi´s dream came true - there is not in this throng of humanity a single soul who saw His face.

- from Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book