When imagining the mosque, I didn’t imagine the things I might pass on the walk there from the harbor: the woman in the window raising a bucket on a string, the men with pushcarts of fruits and vegetables, cats dozing between the flowerpots. These are the street scenes that whisper, the particulars that make a place real, that make a trip our own. The Şakirin mosque appeared more vivid in photos in the book than when I stood before it. And the photographer had zoomed in on design features, creating striking, abstract, images. Yet there was no little girl at the foot of the stairs. There were no women laughing. What is a place of worship without people? What is Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s fashionable pedestrian boulevard, without crowds strolling it in the evening, stopping to buy ice cream cones and eat fish in the cozy restaurants on its side streets?
To anticipate is to court joy, to fall in love with a place the way it is in a book or a movie, or an Eartha Kitt song. But to stay open to the unexpected is to truly embrace anticipation—to know that it serves its purpose before the journey begins and must then be set aside for reality, for whatever beautiful, strange, unpredictable thing awaits when we step off the ferry.
Why aren’t there names for the wind? I thought. For these parentheses of the weather, binding up clouds and rain and snow and sun. Only in wind’s velocity do we really notice it, give it a name. Bob. Harvey. Force 5. Sandy. Katrina. Titled in violence, or as the famous overseas giants: mistral, bise, trade winds. It’s not surprising the wind often has a bad reputation—even Ahab, the psychopath hunting earth’s largest predator, finds it an imposing competitor: “ ’Tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! Who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it.”
Yet most of the time, the wind is a gentler and more ubiquitous thing. It’s just a tree rustler. Hem player. As Marilynne Robinson writes in Lila, “The wind always somewhere, trifling with the leaves, troubling the firelight.” Something to put your face to on a hot day. The quotidian winds go unnamed in the shadow of the bigger ones—as if thunderhead were the only cloud I knew.
If this sounds like Tenner is a man impassioned, I should be clearer: This is no manifesto. There is not much blood flowing through this book, which reads more like a report issued by a concerned think tank. Maybe it’s just that preaching moderation doesn’t lend itself to writing that pulls your face to the page.
But it would be unfortunate if Tenner were dismissed as just a cranky man in his 70s who thinks we spend too much time on our phones. What he is asserting is something we all know to be true. It’s bigger than the tyranny of efficiency. What he’s really asking is that we remember that the tools we’ve invented to improve our lives are just that, tools, to be picked up and put down. We wield them.