The Architect's Apprentice

by Elif Shafak

‘When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.’

For now, grief was pickled and preserved, kept next to the salted meat and dried peppers in the cellars, to be partaken of in better times.

Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird. Break the cage, let the bird take off and soar high.

It is at moments like this that Sheitan taps on our shoulders and whispers in our ear, asking, naively, why we should not want more.

When you are drowning, you grab on to a snake. You don’t say, Are you a good snake or a bad one, let me take a look at you first.’

The son of a man too dominant, the ruler of an empire too vast, the bearer of a soul too tender, the dreamer of poems too delicate, Selim the Sot, Selim the Blond, Selim the Forlorn, left this world when he was fifty years of age.

numbness seized his heart, wiping away signs of joy, like melting snow erasing the footprints of life. He was losing his faith in his workmanship. Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.

life was the sum of the choices one did not make; the paths yearned for but not taken.