The closeness of our bodies, the way we walked upstairs – these too were like things from a dream out of time, and so they would remain in my memory for many years. I saw understanding and disquiet in her glances and I felt grateful to her for the way she expressed her feelings with her eyes. There, once again, it was clear that Füsun and I were made for each other. I had undergone all this anguish on account of this awareness and it did not matter in the least that she was married; just to feel as happy as I did now, climbing up the stairs with her, I was ready to undergo any further torment. To the visitor stubbornly wed to ‘realism’ who cannot suppress a smile at this, having noticed how small that Cukurcuma house is, with the distance between that table and the upstairs bathroom being perhaps four and half paces, not counting the seventeen steps, let me state with categorical and liberal-minded clarity that I would readily have sacrificed my very life for the happiness I felt during that brief interlude. After closing the door to the bathroom on the top floor, I decided that my life was no longer in my control, that my connection to Füsun had shaped it into something beyond my free will. Only by believing this could I be happy, could I indeed bear to live.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (tr. Freely)
Notes from a Room 