It must have been this that I had been looking for; it was what I wanted. How aware I was of what I discovered in my heart! Peace, sleep, death, time! I was both here and there, in peace and waging a bloody war, insomniac as a restless ghost and also interminably somnolent, present in an eternal night and also in time that flowed away inexorably.

Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (1997)