Leibniz’s monad concept

I am reading Didik Didik Freud by Serol Teber and Şenol Ayla and they referred to Tevfik Fikret’s lifestyle as “monadlaşmış” (monadic), describing the concept of monad as: Monad, ünlü filozof Leibniz’in bulduğu …

My having-oriented understanding of wisdom

I am reading Alone with Others by Stephen Batchelor. The first chapter of the book is about having and being, and this paragraph stood out to me: It is symptomatic of our having-oriented culture that the most …

Time is memory

I am reading The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert, and in the essay titled “The Unreality of Time,” she writes about Henry Bergson’s concept of time. Apparently, Albert Einstein famously said “there is no …

A cushioned connection

I am reading The Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima, and in his interview with Gen Hoshino, he explains how he wanted players to be able to create connections with one another. In Death Stranding players can leave …

Printing articles as A5 booklets

I find it difficult to read long articles on a screen. One alternative I’ve grown to enjoy is printing them as small A5 booklets and carrying them in my backpack. This is super easy on iOS, but with the right …

Writing is like painting, and some more

I watched an Orhan Pamuk interview on YouTube where he explains his “painterly practice” and how writing and painting are similar to him. Pamuk explains: I think writing novels is also like painting—visual …

Hockney’s wandering eye photos

I started reading Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. I bought this book a while ago. I was browsing the book at Dussmann, opened a random page which happened to be page 96 and Odell was talking about David …

Smelling as time travel

I underlined this part in Kaveh Akbar’s book Martyr! about how Orkideh could smell lavender to travel to any other point in his life. I used to walk with a sprig of lavender in my pocket—smelling it, I could go to …

One can't write directly about the soul

I’m listening to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings in conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast. Popova shares that, according to Virginia Woolf’s diary, one cannot observe the soul directly—because …

Uncovering the threads of meaning

I am watching episode 7 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where John Vervaeke discusses mindfulness as a psychotechnology that helps us uncover the threads of meaning in our lives. He discusses India’s …

Heidegger was an early product thinker

I am watching Hubert Dreyfus’s lecture on Heidegger and Being and Time, where he describes two modes of being for objects. 1. Readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit): When tools are ready-to-hand, they smoothly integrate …

The blank slate theory

The blank slate theory (Latin: Tabula Rasa) “is the idea that we come into the world without any built-in knowledge, and that everything we know comes later through experience.” When I think …

Posting a memory forward to a distant future

I am reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, and in the book Patricia tells her botany students (emphasis mine): “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of …

Building knowledge around central themes

I am reading Julie Bogart’s book, The Brave Learner. The central theme of the book is to make learning a magical, enchanted experience. To find the joy in learning. She suggests to start with putting the interest …

Going back to stone

I am watching a short video on Isamu Noguchi by SFMoMA and I particularly found his remarks on the limitations of the industry relevant. If you want to live and work in an industrialized situation, you have to use …

The trap the world has become

I am reading The Art of the Novel, where Milan Kundera, in conversation with Christian Salmon, is asked to explain what he means by the term “trap” as used in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the …

True luxury is taking the time to explore

I am listening to artist Elisabetta Di Maggio on YouTube (Awaiting Venice Biennale). She is working in her studio on a huge lotus flower, painstakingly cutting its leaves with a precision scalpel, revealing the …

The “we-ness” of being an octopus

I’m reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, and there’s a section where he writes about Tibetan Maintenance Drones, the degree of independence built into them, and what it feels like to command them. You …

What’s it like to be an octopus

I am watching a YouTube video titled The Insane Biology of: The Octopus and it just showed a cross-section of octopus skin. There is an outer layer called papillae, that can raise into bumps and ridges. Beneath …

He was born to look at the world in awe

I am reading Lüzumsuz Adam and in this story called İp Meselesi, Sait Faik Abasıyanık is describing a man—who, I believe, is himself—who is unfit for any job, doesn’t even know where to begin. O, dünyaya hayretle …