“Outside Time”

Outside Time describes the private temporality Kemal finds in the Keskin household, where recurring suppers with Füsun make the present feel like a memory even as clocks, broadcasts, and political upheaval mark time’s passage. The phrase gathers together the novel’s central tension: ordinary moments can seem to escape history, but remembering them means recognizing that they are gone. Kemal’s collecting and the Museum of Innocence give these moments a material form, turning private recollection into a space others can enter.

Repetition and the private calendar

From October 23, 1976, to August 26, 1984, Kemal made 1,593 supper visits to Çukurcuma over seven years and ten months. The span contained 2,864 days and 409 weeks; his visits averaged four a week, though some weeks brought daily meetings and others were interrupted by his attempts to stay away. He never managed to go more than ten days without seeing Füsun. The Keskin family kept a place for him, and the repeated visits gradually became a routine that neither side needed to arrange formally. This pattern gave his days a private calendar, measured by the next supper and by the time he could spend near Füsun.

At first, each visit still seemed singular: a look, a meal, a conversation, an excursion along the Bosphorus. Over the first two and a half years, those encounters began to reenact what had come before. Their repetition did not empty them of meaning. Instead, it produced a sense of everyday life with its own beauty, suspended from ordinary chronology. The film Feridun hoped to make remained perpetually only months from production, while the evenings accumulated into a world defined less by progress than by recurrence.

Kemal’s account also gives that routine measurable dimensions. He usually arrived around seven and left after the national television sign-off near midnight, spending about five hours at the house. In September 1980, martial law imposed a ten o’clock curfew, forcing him to leave at a quarter to ten. Çetin drove him quickly through darkening, empty streets, and the imposed early departure made each visit feel painfully insufficient. The same household could seem outside public time, yet a government curfew could abruptly dictate its limits.

Clocks, television, and the present moment

A large German-made wooden clock with a glass case, pendulum, and chime hung near the Keskin home’s entrance. It represented the continuity of the outside world more than it served as a practical timekeeper. By the mid-1970s, television had taken over much of the domestic role once played by radio, and the wall clock was losing its authority. Its history also carried the marks of Westernization: ornate clocks had entered Istanbul homes among Westernized pashas and wealthy non-Muslims in the late nineteenth century, then spread among the middle classes as the Republic looked westward. By the 1950s, wristwatches and radios had already made the household clock less necessary.

Television nevertheless made time visible in a new, shared way. Each evening, shortly before TRT’s news, a large clock appeared on screen. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it, while Tarık Bey consulted one of the pocket watches he used. Kemal watched Füsun concentrate, pressing her tongue against her cheek as she adjusted the time; once it was right, she looked at him and smiled. A national broadcast became an intimate ritual. The screen synchronized the household with the country, while Füsun’s small gesture and Kemal’s attentive gaze made the moment belong to them.

For Kemal, the television was not simply a clock. The family watched its programs together, and Füsun passed between the kitchen and the dining area carrying plates while her parents watched films, quiz shows, weather reports, and news. He came to see her movement across the room as the evening’s real spectacle. Often, the closing broadcast ceremony finally made him conscious of how late it had become. The hours had passed, but their emotional measure was the pleasure of being with Füsun, not the program schedule.

Remembering the present

Kemal distinguishes the shared line of time from the individual moments linked along it. Clocks and calendars regulate people’s relations with society; they do not preserve the felt substance of a moment. A present can be intensely happy and still become painful in retrospect, because recalling the line that connects moments also means recognizing that it ends. Kemal identifies his happiest moment only after it has become irretrievable. He argues that mementos can preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights of an instant more faithfully than the people who shared it, and that possessing something from the moment helps bear the pain of its loss.

During the suppers, Kemal often felt he was experiencing the present from a distance. His body occupied the evening as it happened, while his mind seemed to watch himself and Füsun as if the scene were already past. The sameness of their conversations did not by itself produce this sensation; rather, he felt that he was not fully inhabiting the moments as they unfolded. He later describes this as a temporal illusion and asks visitors to the Museum of Innocence to see its buttons, glasses, photographs, and Füsun’s combs not as present-day things alone, but as his memories.

The objects he collected therefore connect the household’s repetitive time to the museum’s arrangement of memory. Each thing could call up a particular evening, and the remembered moments seemed, as the years passed, to expand and merge. The museum re-creates the enchanted space of the Keskin home so that visitors can move through it as though through time. Outside Time is not a claim that loss has been overcome: the museum makes moments available to revisit precisely because they cannot return as lived experience.

The household amid public history

The Keskin home’s sense of suspension depended on its surrounding world, not on an absence of history. Television news repeatedly reported that the country was sliding toward civil war. By 1978, bombs were exploding at night in Çukurcuma, and armed factions fought over nearby streets, coffeehouses, and squares. Çetin encountered danger while driving Kemal to and from the family home, and refused Kemal’s suggestion that he go alone. The visits offered a profound peace, but political violence remained audible and visible at its edges; the news could break the feeling of being outside time.

Public rituals of death provide another contrast. From the balcony of his family apartment, Kemal had watched funeral processions leave Teşvikiye Mosque for Nişantaşı Square. As children, he and his brother imitated the bearers with heavy bolsters and hummed the funeral march. The ceremonies of prominent figures attracted unexpected spectators, and the children came to experience them as diversions rather than consolation for the bereaved. Later, when Kemal’s father died, familiar belongings in the bedroom became vessels of a vanished childhood. He opened drawers containing old phone bills, telegrams, medicines, and his father’s cough syrup; even the ordinary street below seemed newly irreplaceable. Private grief altered the meaning of objects and everyday scenes, making the past present as memory rather than as recoverable time.

From private recollection to the museum

Kemal’s later journey to Paris clarifies the distance involved in remembering. Istanbul’s streets were full of reminders of Füsun, and there he could see her only through the prism of his obsession. Away from the city, he felt able to view both Füsun and that obsession from the outside. In small, sparsely visited museums, among intimate collections and rooms set apart from urban noise, he found a sense of consolation and timelessness. These experiences strengthened the connection between museums and the suspended spaces of memory that he had first found at the Keskin supper table.

The expression thus describes both an emotional experience and a narrative method. The recurring dinners slow the story into repeated gestures, while retrospective narration gathers their separate moments into a life-shaped account. The Museum of Innocence extends that process: objects become a visible sequence through which private time can be approached again. Yet the sequence also exposes its limit. To preserve a moment is to acknowledge its distance, and the museum’s power comes from holding together the comfort of return and the knowledge that the original present is over.