Erotapokriseis III
EN:
Hello, my dear readers, I’ve received many kind and thoughtful messages from you lately. I answered most of them privately, but a few questions felt like they belonged here too. Much love! TR:
Merhaba sevgili okurlarım, Son zamanlarda sizden çok güzel ve düşünceli mesajlar aldım. Çoğuna özel olarak dönüş yaptım, ama bazı soruların burada da yer bulması gerektiğini düşündüm. Çok sevgiler. :)
This reader sent a long email; I’ll try to relay the question as closely as I can to the way they asked it.
1) Q: In Quantum Chromodynamics you write that your mass is “the energy of permanently confined color fields.” That’s almost a spiritual claim dressed as physics. Does knowing that 99% of your body’s mass is field energy actually change how it feels to be in a body, or is it just a beautiful fact?
A: No, and I’d resist the word spiritual. The body stays stubbornly itself; physics doesn’t change how it feels, only the story I tell about the feeling.
2) Q: You close Quantum Chromodynamics with “we have been asking for fifty years.” If you had to bet: will confinement be proven analytically in your lifetime, or do we just keep computing it forever?
A: I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to. You can’t schedule an idea that doesn’t exist yet. I don’t bet on theorems; I shouldn’t! We’d rather keep computing and let it surprise us.
3) Q: In Kant you call him “a troll” for demolishing the proofs of God and the soul and then postulating them anyway for morality. Is that intellectual dishonesty, or the most honest thing he did?
A: Both, and that isn’t a dodge. The trolling is real but it isn’t cheap: he demolished the proofs, refused to pretend reason could recover them, and moved the question into practical reason, out loud. Am I at peace with it? No. But it may be the most honest version of a move that had no honest version.
4) Q: You say his prejudices should make us “deeply suspicious of philosophers who claim their personal limitations don’t affect their universal theories.” Do you turn that same suspicion on yourself when you write?
A: I try to, and I don’t fully trust that I succeed. It is easy to aim that suspicion outward and much harder to catch it in yourself, because your own blind spots are exactly the ones you cannot see. So the honest answer is that I hold the rule over my own writing and assume I am still failing it somewhere I haven’t noticed yet. The most I can do is keep the suspicion switched on and let other people show me where it should have fired.
5) Q: Kant never traveled ten miles and changed everything; you’ve been to Tokyo twelve times and counting. Do you ever secretly envy the man who didn’t need the world to think?
A: No. I don’t envy him for a second. The world is mine, and I’m going to keep wandering it and discovering new places. I’ll even travel on Kant’s behalf.
6) Q: You say folding is the one place time stops for you, you who notices every minute. But you said the same about Go in In Defense of Boredom. Is it the structure you love, or the disappearing?
A: Structure.
P.S. I gave her the long answer in the email.
7) Q: You folded a crane for everyone you love and left them with Sadako in Hiroshima. Will you write on Hiroshima?
A: No. Even if I wanted to, it would be too overwhelming for me to write. It is so hard to put into words. Hiroshima was too graphic for me. It stayed with me for a very long time. For a long while I felt disgust, not so much at science as at knowing, and at the physicists who made it. I hope there is a God. There is no limit to what a human being can do, and no limit to what they cannot.
8) Q: You wrote a whole essay on how America makes its thinkers invisible (/blog/2025/american-anti-intellectualism/) and then you moved there to become one. Has it started working on you yet? Do you catch yourself reaching for the useful answer over the interesting one?
A: Honestly? It’s working a little. I catch myself measuring ideas by whether they’ll go anywhere, and that question would have embarrassed me five years ago. But noticing it is still half the fight. The blog is where I go to not do that. (Ask me again in five years, ahahha!)
9) Q: You celebrate the flaneur and “purposeless presence,” yet you’ve confessed you can’t sit idle for twenty seconds and that boş durma is a curse. Aren’t you more American than you’d like to admit?
A: Ah, Filizko can be neither American nor flaneur. I’m always in the metaxy!
10) Q: In My Biggest Red Flag you admit the intolerance can be “loneliness dressed up as standards,” a way to keep people from getting close enough to notice the depth you demand isn’t always in you. Honestly: how often is that the real reason?
A: So hard to answer, and the difficulty is the tell. Sometimes the standard is real and sometimes it’s a wall with a standard painted on it, and I can’t always see which from the inside. The people who get close anyway are the ones who show me the difference.
11) Q: Your whole blog demands depth from its reader. Is the blog itself a filter, a way of only meeting people who pass the test before they ever reach you?
A: Ah, not at all. I can meet you at whatever depth you want. But getting here was painful. My whole life went by like a teenager’s. Filtre miltre yok, bam bam bam! :)
12) Q: You define depth as “the willingness to be changed by what you encounter.” What is the last thing, a book, a person, an idea, that actually changed you instead of confirming you?
A: While thinking about this, I thought: isn’t being able to have an encounter like that something to be grateful for in itself? Not all of us are lucky enough to run into one. I’ll add it once I find it. I need to think a little. It’s very late now.
Edit 2025/03/19: Found it! Ink, of all things. I switched to an iron-gall ink that keeps changing color for days after it dries, darkening as it oxidizes. Watching a finished page keep changing without me did something quiet to my idea of “finished.” I now distrust the word. Cheers! :)
This question came in Turkish, and the reader is asking me to marry him. I may be the first woman to receive a proposal through a blog.
13) Q: Evlen benimle!
A: Çok şekersiniz. Neyimden böyle hoşlandınız bilemedim ama tahmin ettiğiniz kişi olmayabilirim. Sevgiler. :)
This question came in Turkish.
14) Q: Bu kadar okumak ve derin düşünmek özel hayatınızda sorun çıkartmıyor mu?
A: Çok güzel bir soru bu. Çok teşekkür ederim.
İstediğim kadar kitap okuyamıyorum, çoğu okumam gençlikten. Yani çok okuyan birisi miyim emin değilim. Derin düşünüyor muyum onu da bilmiyorum. Etrafımda sevdiğim ve çok değer verdiğim insanlar var ve bu kişiler tarafından da çok sevdildiğimi ve değerli görüldüğümü biliyorum, sağ olsunlar. Yani olduğum halimle kabul ediliyorum, kimseden de kendimin aynısını asla beklemiyorum. Küçük circle, belki de beni koruyan şey. Sorunuzu cevaplayabildim mi bilemiyorum. Çok sevgiler.
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