Orhan Pamuk in Literary Hub:
In 1964, when I was about 12 or 13, I spent the summer at a house by the seaside 35 miles from Istanbul. I would leap over the low garden wall and walk towards the beach through the rocks and empty fields that lined the shore, inspecting all the marvelous little surprises that nature would lay upon my path. One day I came across a small pool of water among the rocks. It wasn’t exactly a pool. The sea kept pouring in through the gaps among the rocks and stones. But like a real pool, it was about one foot deep and six or seven meters wide, and shielded from the assault of the sea’s unruly waves. I quickly discovered that below the unruffled and perfectly transparent surface of my “pool” was another world, a whole civilization, and I began to spend more and more time there, alone in the summer heat, fascinated by the bustling realm submerged in the tepid seawater.
More here.