Istanbul

lies in the Western imagination like a bridge

Its own periphery studded with new high-rise buildings, glinting and winking in the fading light from the west, the future seems to crowd from the edge as if besieging an older, even more ancient Istanbul.

Istanbul was written flying out of that city, travelling westward over the austerity of the snowbound Swiss Alps, toward home and familiarity. I had visited the city as a young man twenty five years before, and had come away besotted by the sheer untrammeled, gorgeously outlandish presence of the East, a past I had inhabited only in my imagination, and perhaps even more by the cold, hard, beautiful fact that it actually existed.