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Quote by Mehmet Çil

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Mehmet Çil

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“For a while, I just sat there in that position, but eventually I gave up and was about to turn the lights off when it hit me. I knew what was stuck in my head. A phrase. Reaching for my desk, I grabbed the new notebook and pencil that were sitting by the edge and flipped the cover, lying flat on my back. Steadying the spine of the notebook with my palm, I took the pencil to the first blank page and wrote the words: “All the lovers in the night.” The phrase had appeared out of nowhere. Through the faint light of the room, I looked over the words, which came together in the strangest way. On the one hand, they felt new to me, like something I’d never heard or seen before, though I also felt like maybe I had read them somewhere, in the title of a movie or a song, which meant it had emerged from someplace inside of me. Hard to say. Seeing my handwriting under the light, I realized that this was the first time I’d written something without having a specific purpose, not a comment in somebody else’s manuscript or galley, but my own words on a blank sheet of paper. I had no clue what to do with these words, no idea what they were for, or what they meant, but I stared at them and felt them reach my heart and linger there.”

“And if one loves me for my judgement, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.”

“You do not remember your family?' ...'Tití tried to find them after the storm...[E]veryone figured my family got washed out in the rapids with the hundreds of other boricuas who disappeared.' Río held himself like he was bracing against a chill. 'You speak as though it does not pain you.' 'I ain't gonna cry about it,' I said, tucking San Cristóbal back into my shirt. 'You can't change what happened. Better to just accept it and move on.' 'Benigno.' He brought himself upright again. 'Do you mean to say you do not cry?' ...'What does that matter?' 'It -matters,' he insisted. 'Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”

“For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape. We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness. Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. Over the past decade, everything has become politicized. Churches, universities, sports, food selection, movie awards shows, late-night comedy— they have all turned into political arenas. Except this was not politics as it is normally understood. Healthy societies produce the politics of distribution. How should the resources of the society be allocated? Unhappy societies produce the politics of recognition. Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment, by a person or a group’s feelings that society does not respect or recognize them. The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic policies or to address this or that social ill; he is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility, to find a way to admire himself. But, of course, the politics of recognition doesn’t actually give you community and connection. People join partisan tribes, but they are not in fact meeting together, serving one another, befriending one another. Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination. You may try to escape a world of isolation and moral meaninglessness, only to find yourself in the pulverizing destructiveness of the culture wars.”