What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin ...
Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world–and I can identify with them easily–succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
Orhan Pamuk
Nobel Lecture (translation by Maureen Freely)
Pamuk held his Nobel Lecture on 7 December 2006 at the Swedish Academy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Academy>, Stockholm <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm>. The lecture was entitled "/Babamın Bavulu/" ("My Father's Suitcase")^[22] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_Pamuk#cite_note-AutoEC-16-22> and was given in Turkish. In the lecture he allegorically spoke of relations between Eastern and Western civilizations using the theme of his relationship with his father.
