The Art of Serenity

The section opens with Lisa, a twenty-eight-year-old, beautiful, successful actress who enters the office of the author, Toksöz Karasu, and weeps: she says she always chooses men who want to change her, that her friend Joe called her «selfish» and left her, and that she thinks herself a «bad person». The reason: Lisa accepted a film offer from Los Angeles and postponed a planned trip to Alaska with Joe. The author tells her «you are both selfish — in a good sense, you both have the right to love and protect yourselves». This sentence gives the main idea of the section: self-love comes before loving others.

The author separates self-love from narcissism: self-love is not morbid egocentrism but the healthy compassion a person turns on himself. He reinterprets the Narcissus myth: the youth sees only himself, reaches towards his reflection in the water and is lost, but the story is also a story of «transformation from human to flower», of becoming part of a larger whole. In this sense compassionate self-love is «healthy narcissism», the basis of attaching to others. A Rumi quotation reinforces the idea «free birds receive wings as they fall».

In the section «Good exists because evil exists» Joe rings Lisa the same evening, Lisa greets him naked in a red tie, and Joe is angry that the tie is spoiled by powder. The author speaks of Lisa's wish to be loved by everyone, even to win the approval of those who reject her (Confucius: «it is enough to be loved by the good people in the village»). A Yiddish folk story — an old man asking travellers at the city gate «where do you come from, what people live there?» — shows the effect of the past on the present. The author concludes: there are no «good» and «bad» people, goodness and evil are carried by people in different degrees; the «stingy Joe» and the Joe who gave Lisa a surprise birthday at 24 are the same Joe. The Leonardo da Vinci story (the youth who modelled for Christ becomes years later the model for Judas) shows this duality.

The section «Search for wholeness» explains Joe's childhood trauma: his mother left home when he was four, he lived between two houses and always needed to merge with another to be «whole». The author recalls Aristophanes' hermaphrodite myth from Plato's «Symposium»: humans once united two sexes in themselves, Zeus split them in two, and each half seeks the lost whole. But love is not merging: Joe's wish was not to be with Lisa but to merge with her, which Lisa lives as «psychological cannibalism». The state of fusion in the womb, «transitional objects» (a soft toy, a telephone) and adults' attachment to such objects complete the thought. The style is warm and conversational; the weakness is that mythological and philosophical quotations are many and the recommendations general.

• Each part begins with a clinical story and then widens with myth, philosophy and sayings of wisdom
• The author joins his own observations to sources such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Rumi and Plato
• The headings are short aphorisms and let the reader read from any point
• The tone is warm, non-judgmental and conversational