TE16 Turkish Delight

Letters to Shefkati inner voice was ranting about the sameness of that day with any other. I lit a cigarette and continued reading the first draft of Mr. Mehmet’s translation of Henri Bergson’s text on sources of religion and morals. There was nothing particularly good in it, everything was the same with everything else. It’s just that after a while I got distracted. I was mulling over how our community was going to interpret what the wise Bergson said about Christianity. Even though what I do is primarily proofreading -only- I always find myself debating some parts of the work. These vague prompts stick with me long after I’m done with a text. I’ve always had this habit of not letting go. Back in school, in the midst of an algebra class I’d think of a poem from Hamid, Baki or Fuzuli and drift off… Of course, that was always followed by our mean teacher Mr. Sami’s screeching over my head: “Are you paying attention, mister?!” I was reading the same paragraph over and over again; as much as I remember now it went on like this: then let’s align all the meanings of our word on a staircase, as we would with colors of a spectrum or keys of a gamut . I decided to go out for lunch when the words stopped to make sense. I left the printing house staring at the poplar trees, with the noise of my ungratefulness at the back of my neck. Though, I’d been meaning to go to the meatball place at Sultanahmet for some

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