“Losing all sense of Time”

“Losing all sense of Time” describes both a private experience of happiness and the principle behind Kemal Basmacı’s Museum of Innocence. Kemal does not mean forgetting clocks or calendars; he means escaping, for a time, the painful sense of a line joining present moments and carrying life toward its end. His collection gives that line a spatial form: objects preserve particular moments, while the museum brings them together for viewers to encounter at once.

Moments, Memory, and Loss

Kemal’s understanding of time grows from the difference between a moment as it is lived and a moment recognized later as the happiest of a life. At the time, even intense joy can coexist with hope for something better to come. Only in retrospect, when a life has taken shape, can a person identify a moment as unsurpassed. That recognition also confirms that the moment is gone. For Kemal, the pain of naming happiness retrospectively can be borne through possession of something belonging to that instant: mementos retain its colors, textures, images, and pleasures more faithfully than the people who shared it.

His account draws on Aristotle’s distinction between Time and the indivisible moments he calls the present. Time is the line connecting those separate moments. Clocks and calendars regulate people’s relations with one another and with society; they do not, in themselves, restore an awareness of Time. During Kemal’s eight years of dinners at the Keskin Family Home in Çukurcuma, he watched Füsun check her watch against the black-and-white clock shown on television before the news. Her concern was whether the watch was set correctly, not whether she had remembered Time. A smile exchanged in that ordinary scene could nevertheless give Kemal enough happiness to last a lifetime.

Private Time and Shared Rituals

The idea also gathers force from the way personal memory is entangled with public and family life. From the balcony of his childhood home, overlooking Teşvikiye Mosque, Kemal had watched funerals pass through a familiar Istanbul landscape. As children, he and his brother imitated the bearers of the dead with heavy divan bolsters on their shoulders. Public funerals could draw unexpected visitors to the apartment, and his mother observed that some came to watch the procession rather than visit the family. Repeated exposure had made the ceremonies seem like an amusing diversion; death was familiar enough to be turned into a spectacle.

His father’s death changed the meaning of ordinary things. At the bedside, Kemal opened drawers and touched old phone bills, telegrams, medicines, and other objects associated with his childhood. Cedar and the scent of his father’s cough syrup recalled a vanished past; even the street outside became an irreplaceable memento. The half-finished bottle of Yeni Rakı left in the refrigerator by his father’s last night likewise became part of the intimate scene of loss. These details show how an object or place can seem ordinary until death makes its connection to a particular life impossible to recover except through memory.

The Museum as Time Made Visible

Kemal’s collection turns this personal practice into an architectural argument. He takes objects touched by Füsun from the Keskin Family Home to preserve the happy moments he hoped would sustain him after his visits ended. In the museum, he wants the entire collection—and, with it, his whole story—to be visible from wherever a visitor stands. The point is not merely to admire old possessions: seeing them together is meant to loosen the visitor’s dependence on a single chronological sequence and offer consolation through a temporary loss of time-consciousness.

The building itself enacts the exchange between museum and home. Kemal brings his collection to the converted house, including the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet from the Merhamet Apartments where he and Füsun made love, and stores these objects in the attic. The attic, once a dark, mildewed space, becomes clean and bright beneath a skylight. Kemal sleeps there among the objects, trying to make the museum a dwelling again. In his formulation, a real museum transforms Time into Space: the separated traces of a life are gathered into a place where they can be encountered together.

From Private Consolation to Public Display

The museum’s argument depends on displaying what private life and social convention might otherwise keep hidden or treat as embarrassing. Kemal tells Orhan Pamuk that objects associated with shame can become possessions to take pride in when exhibited. The museum is therefore not only a refuge for Kemal’s grief; it asks visitors to recognize the value of ordinary lives and their material traces. Its intended atmosphere is reverent: guards should explain the history and emotional meanings of the collection, rather than simply silence visitors or police their behavior. Kemal imagines the museum open to lovers who have nowhere else to kiss, extending its welcome to intimate life instead of excluding it.

Its practical design reinforces that invitation. The whole collection should be visible from multiple viewpoints, and the book should include a map so readers can walk Istanbul’s streets with the story in mind. Kemal also proposes placing an admission ticket in each copy of the novel, allowing its reader free entry on a first visit. The book and museum thus become connected routes through the same remembered life: reading assembles the story in sequence, while the museum presents its material traces in shared space. Losing all sense of Time is not the erasure of memory, but the consolation Kemal seeks when memory makes the ending of time—and of life—painfully clear.