41-Necip Erdogan

The mysterious man who gives the ability to experience every book he reads has not appeared again to Necip since the day he appeared on his older sister hanging from the last floor with the shape formed by white spheres coming together, but this ability opened up the world of books. The book given as a gift by his teacher who played the harmonica at Cumhuriyet primary school was the first book he read and was a short book. The black-haired brunette girl was also his first love, he always left the handkerchief behind Özlem while playing the game "I sell oil, I sell honey, my master is dead, I sell" in the schoolyard, Necip wrote down the happiest moments of his life in his notebooks, sitting next to her and playing with plastic beans, for her to chase and catch him. It was the moment when they wrote "Ali, come" many times, and the saddest moment was when the white car he was waiting for at the school gate when he turned eight did not arrive. Of course, he fell in love again later in life, but like childhood, the first love could only happen once. Years later, after he got married and became a father, he was blinded by love. When he decided to leave his wife and son, he read "The White Ship". It told about the loneliness of a child growing up without a father. As the pages progressed, Necip found himself in the book. While looking at the sea from a high hill...

He saw the white ship floating ahead like a swan. I wonder if his father was the captain of that ship? Will he return one day and make you feel his warmth? Could the father be a friend or an older brother when necessary, or could he be a sullen man, often scolding and sometimes beating, without understanding? What does father actually mean? Even though he knew the dictionary meaning. The meaning of this word could not settle in his mind, when he got out of the book and returned to his life, he remembered the beating he received in the store, where he spent the money he got from his father to buy bread and when he returned home, his father held his ear and spent the money back, he remembered the day when he turned eighteen, he woke up early in the morning, stole money from his father and planned to run away to the seaside to work as a waiter, His capture at the last moment and the beating he received again in front of the door... He left the question "Do you think you are a man?" unanswered, maybe being a man was not about turning eighteen, standing on your own feet, working only one day while working as a waiter in that seaside town and running away the second day. It was very difficult to be a man and to admit it, it was very difficult to watch this endless blue and listen to the sound of the waves. Necip felt that he did not have enough power to pay this price. While he was listening to Osman's summer holiday stories every summer, he would also wonder how deep the sea is. It was big and how deep was it? Was it bigger than the lentil washing pool in Osman's father's factory and was the water yellow? He knew that every summer holiday his uncle would take Osman in his arms, lift him into the air and then throw him into the sea. They would set out early in the morning with the belongings they piled into the red car with a wide back. Summer vacation was sand and sun for his cousin, but for Necip, it meant working in different workplaces - to learn about life - relatives' children were given as apprentices to one of the relatives' workplace.

He was lost in the past in this run-down place; during his teaching years, he had a dream of starting the project that "geniuses can emerge from children who climb mountains"; when he heard this sentence, he put down the book in his hand and drew a young man trying to sleep by watching the stars on a cool summer night; For some he is a freedom fighter, for some he is a terrorist...

They are the young people who have always been on the agenda for the last thirty years; I wonder what these young people think about love? I read an interview about people who had sex being executed, but what else is there in the world other than lying on the grass on a cool summer night and watching the stars with your lover?

During the years I worked in social services, there were different people in my life... women who were subjected to violence by their husbands or sold for alcohol money, young girls who were beaten and harassed, bright young men who ran away from home and emulated femininity because of the rape of a truck driver. I took a break from education in my life but continued to learn. For years, the boy who cried silently because he was abandoned under the duvet in the dormitory while the security guard was snoring on the sofa during night shifts taught me about life, and Hüseyin, who was confined to bed as a result of muscle wasting while chasing the ball in his youth and who was watching our car from the window of his house in the mountain village with his big blue eyes, also taught me about life. He taught me that we are not always straight, that we are all disabled candidates. When Hüseyin became bedridden, he became a complete bookworm. I used to bring him books every month when I came to visit him. Books were the only thing that kept him connected to life, and I could never keep up with his reading speed. I could teach complex formulas to fresh minds in the morning hours, when the mind is most open. Actually, I was torn between teaching and asking about the health of an elderly person who started to take a nap again even though he had just woken up in front of the television at the same time. His egoism played a part in this indecision, why? Because sometimes I finished two books in a night, I was reading the novels I had left unfinished from my window with the smell of flowers brought by the cool air. I was reading with excitement, I guess I was writing for reading.

The only condition for love was to be alone.

While I was reminiscing about the past on this rooftop, the person I frequently visited on the rooftop, who was living the last years of her life and always found me singing folk songs and crying, greeted me with the cliché question "Necmettiin", are you here, so as not to mention her husband's name, was actually my true friend in my youth, I think she passed away. My first period ended with my youth. My friend, who was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was almost living history. He still remembered the big hats of the occupying soldiers. I always remember the golden necklace he found in his childhood, that his father was always a smart daughter and wrote her name in the old and new alphabet. Due to gangrene, he was foot to foot. His finger was cut off and curved upwards. The town we lived in was a place that we could call a desert climate, where the sun is always shining and the sky is always light blue. It had rained. I listened to the snowfall continuing all day and reaching the level of the roofs of the houses, and it was one of the happiest moments for a child. When he woke up in the morning, longing for the snow, he woke up in a white wedding dress and the end of hours of play resulted in gangrene. The two fingers he lost in his childhood were frequently used when he came of age to get married. The person she could not forget in her life was Mustafa, whom she broke up with after seven years of engagement....

He was about to complete ninety-two years in this world, but his anger towards her was still not over. As I listened to him, I observed that people were more devoted to the revolution in the first years. While we were walking around the southern town far from the capital with chadors, the guard called us and said, one day, my mother and I got scared, when we asked what our crime was, it is forbidden to walk around with chadors. said the guard, I think the guard was a country lover who was strictly devoted to the revolution and did his duty without interruption. He had a place in his new letters among his memories, he used to say that one day my father sat on his knee and wrote "Bahriye" in new letters, and while he was telling this with the same excitement, he wrote his name in the air. He was always worse than his wife, who was my namesake. He would often talk about his memories, telling that he had beaten not only himself but also the children. I could feel him trembling, whether it was from fear or hatred, especially when he told me that he chased my uncle with a cleaver and that my uncle, who was attending primary school in those years, came back from the dead thanks to the help of the shopkeeper who intervened in the street. I would see him walking out at a fast pace, I learned everything about him from my friend, how determined he was, how much he loved to read, and he would often repeat that my uncle was the most precious child among the four children, and he would state that my mother, my aunt, or my younger uncle were his children in the second place. Why was my elder uncle so important to him? I couldn't understand how important it was, but it was clear that he was a determined person. During the years when he was a substitute teacher, he was somehow despised by the "noble" teachers at the school where he worked, so he successfully graduated from the teacher's school by staying in his room and working for days, and marrying the teacher's daughter of the famous attorney of this small town made him poor and partially despised. After his teenage years when he was an orphan, his years of wealth began, he was blessed with his actions in many respects, he was one of the few manufacturers in our town who had the first telephone and the first car, moreover, he was known by the majority, the reason for this fame was his charity, he divided the sacks of pulses into bags and distributed them to the poor again during the Eid al-Adha. and was involved in collecting activities and now he was struggling with cancer. How strange it was that he spent his youth in the terrace and his middle age in the attic!

There are two colors that affect me. When I was a child, I thought the color of the ground where the basketball match was played was white, so I was first impressed by yellow. I met the second color when I was seventeen, a wheat field in the south that resembles a green sea in the spring months...

I witnessed the wheat sprouts swaying with the light wind change color with the summer season, and I also witnessed the green of the pistachios floating like a thin line between the phyllo dough while the yellow slices were jumping on the tray as the hot syrup was poured next to the baklava master I worked with in my childhood, but the geography I lived in made me think of this rainbow. However, in the nineties, the summer houses, which had just begun to enter our lives in the nineties, began to replace the summer cottages of the seventies - of course, firstly owned by high-income people.

I met a truly high-income family in the year the walls fell and the first Gulf War took place.

We visited this rich family on a summer day. The moments that all of us have difficulties in adolescence are the boring moments spent as guests because we receive instructions from our elders, say "Welcome", kiss your uncle's or aunt's hand, give slippers or cologne to the guest...

etc. These conversations, which always bored me, seemed too formal and sometimes too fake. Before leaving, the ladies who shared their troubles as if they were friends of fate, became enemies after long conversations in front of the door, as the outer door closed, and I witnessed this great transformation because of these fake friendships and so on. However, when the tulle curtain, which was left slightly open in front of the balcony door in the large hall where we were welcomed, moved with the effect of the wind, I was struck by the wind. It was the first time I encountered this color, or rather this shade of this color, so there were different tones in life, perhaps this was the richness, we seeing shades that the poor people have not seen, yes, I loved dark blue that day, because I saw the sea for the first time. While looking at the endless sea, I would dream of what I would do when I married Neslihan and I would write letters full of pages, and now I was enjoying the silence and darkness among books and pictures to escape from it and be alone; I think writing letters has become obsolete, just like our love... Messages written short and quickly, without looking at the phone keys while writing, have made history the days when you smelled your lover and waited for the postman for days. Love letters, glitter cards sent before Eid or New Year's Eve are now in the archives. cassettes, divided into sixties and nineties, cassettes that I spent hours opening and re-winding, filling the gaps at the top with cotton to record, and slowly spinning in a cassette player with rainbow-like lights on its speaker that I placed next to the television. On one of the days I was teaching, music was coming from the back rows. When I said "Turn off that tape recorder" when I heard his voice, I was subjected to the questioning looks of young people who had no idea what a tape recorder was, I forgot that they were right, I remember the long journeys I took with the Walkman, filled with middle-aged, pot-bellied passengers sleeping snoring in the silence of the night, mixed with the smell of feet and breath. I remembered the long journey of about a thousand kilometers, from the southeastern town where I spent eighteen years of my life, to the west for the first time in order to be a university student. That journey meant the end of an era in my life, in fact, I think it has the same meaning for all young people, university life means independence. As you move away from home, you dream of all kinds of dreams. Your first goal is to find a girlfriend or boyfriend. Since you think that you are an individual standing on your own feet, the first condition of freedom is to go home with your lover immediately. Finding a friend of the opposite sex is the first priority of your life. It does not matter how many years you will finish school, finding a friend. It happens when you look around for hours alone in the canteen for a job, or you go to class and search for candidates with your eyes for a long time. I first realized how much of an influence the town where I spent my childhood had in the first days of my university life. I realized how little my civil courage was, and how much time I had to communicate with people. I realized that I needed it. I had just gotten to the stage of greeting and asking how I was doing when I realized that I had bonded very quickly among my classmates and that romantic relationships had begun, but I must also point out that the first three relationships that were established most quickly did not reach a happy ending. When school ended, everyone thought that the six people I mentioned were He thought he was going to get married, but it was a surprise for many of my friends, including me, that all three of these relationships, which lasted five years, ended in separation. I will have to divide my university years into two: my undergraduate and graduate years. My graduate years, or as they are also called, my lonely years, will be teaching in high school during the day and working in the evenings. I spent my time reading books in the university library. The majority of my friends during my undergraduate period were no longer there, it was as if a spell had been cast on me, and I began to think that I would spend the next years in the university library. I was neither fully aware that I was a teacher nor a student. I would say goodbye to my tie, put on my jeans instead of my fabric trousers, and start walking around the campus after dinner. I read three books that influenced me very much during this period. While watching the sun set on the top bunk, I was turning the pages of Jostein Gardner's famous Sofinin's World with great curiosity, as if I had stepped into a new world. The magical world of mathematics, which I entered at the age of sixteen, was replaced by the attractive and mysterious world of philosophy. After this book, which started with the question "Who are you?", and thanks to "The Alchemist", which my literature teacher friends read in their primary school years, I now realized that just looking at the QA section in the library is equivalent to eating the same meal every night. After these two fascinating books, I felt sad with the last sentences of "Sugar Orange", which perfectly describes the pure heart of a child. Thanks to these three books, I started to wander in front of the literature shelves, and the majority of the top row of these shelves seemed to me.

According to him, it was full of books by Aziz Nesin, who knew all the characteristics of the Turkish people well and had a very strong pen.

Thanks to my loneliness, I started reading more. Since my roommates were all in their undergraduate years, maybe I didn't have much in common, so reading rather than chatting was more attractive. This system continued in my life until my military service. I thought I would not have time to read books during military service. This was the case for the first months. The assumption was true, but since I had to work at night after basic training, I started to spend long winter nights reading again.

The first book of essays I read was Montaigne. In fact, since I read this book in my childhood, when I saw another book of essays, I thought to myself that they had stolen Montaigne's book. Of course, I was not old enough to understand that essays were a style! The biggest problem of today's people is "laziness", losing weight without running or exercising, learning without reading and researching. working, resorting to games of chance or gambling to get rich in a short time, there are now "cafes" in many cities that offer games of chance, people who hate reading read sports newspapers grumbling at their desks and go to places as quiet as a library to get all kinds of information, from the health of horses to the injury status of football players. If this energy was spent on science, our country would make a lot of progress! In the southeastern provinces where I went to do a survey when I had just completed my secondary education, the most common places I saw were coffee houses. I think the abundance of these places, all of which are full and there are at most four workplaces between them, is enough for you to understand the problem. I don't think there is any need to pursue an academic career for years and publish reports, or to make "flattering" statements saying that if the current opposition comes to power, it would be a disaster for our country, in order to be close to the government. What I remember about these cities are the helicopters constantly circling overhead, the gun on their knees while the family was playing okey in the tea garden. Midyat is the city where people cover themselves with tablecloths and which I find interesting. Muslims and Christians were so intertwined and they were young girls walking around freely with crosses around their necks. I saw the same scene years later on Rumeli Street. It is very nice to have people of different faiths in a city. It is proof of how tolerant that country is. I think it is a proof of how tolerant that country is. The best answer to be given to Europe, which claims that this is the case, is for people of different beliefs and sects to live together in our country. During the Ottoman Empire, our ancestors implemented this perfectly. I think this is due to the fact that the decline of the empire that most embraced contemporary values lasted three hundred years, I think it would have been possible if it were not for the palace intrigues. The empire could continue to dominate the Mediterranean for many years. I recommend you to read the Safiye Sultan series by Ann Chamberlain, which tells the palace intrigues very well. "Meyyale" by one of our own writers, Hıfzı Topuz, was the first book that made me love historical novels. History is something I have loved since my primary school years. I especially liked memorizing the dates of wars, that's why my primary school teacher called me "chronological child", I think numbers started to look attractive to me in those years, and I learned that the numbers that appealed to me were discovered by the Arabs only in my undergraduate education in the history of science. In this course, Georges İfrah's We read the series called "Universal History of Numbers". The author, who is a mathematics teacher, left his job to search for an answer to his student's question, "Teacher, where do numbers come from?" when he entered the classroom one day. He went on a world tour and created this book by working as a dishwasher in the cities he visited. Now, he wrote this book in bookstores "cheap". I must admit that I felt sad when I saw it in the "book" sections. I think teachers have an impact on students' lives in the same way that teachers have a role in students' lives. Imagine if Gauss's mathematics teacher had not had a headache, maybe this genius would have been noticed later. Let me tell you briefly for those who have not heard the story, who do not want to give lectures. In order to keep the students busy, the mathematics teacher says, "Write down the numbers from one to one hundred and add them together and bring me the result." After about ten seconds, the poor man was shocked when he saw Gauss standing next to the table with a notebook in his hand. How did he feel? If he knew the answer was five thousand fifty, how did he find it so quickly? If the teacher asked this question without knowing the answer, and when he sees that the answer is correct, then the period of shock will be delayed a little. I would not want to be in his place in either case, I think if this incident had happened in our country in the eighties, poor Gauss would have received a clean stick from the teacher. Not everyone among us may be a mathematician, so let me briefly talk about the Gauss method. While his classmates first added one and two, he added one and one hundred and found one hundred and one, then he added two and ninety-nine and found one hundred and one again.

Gauss then added three and ninety-eight and found one hundred and one again. Deciding that he would get fifty to one hundred and one in this way, Gauss multiplied fifty and one hundred and found the answer: I think five thousand and fifty is the largest number his friends found at that time, at most fifty-five. I think the secret of being a genius is to add in a certain order. or instead of acting in a planned way, being original and not falling into any mold...