Radio Jeddah<\/p>\n
FAREWELL<\/strong> by <\/p>\n My Dear Listeners, We have been together, on and off the air, since more than a year now. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Radio Jeddah FAREWELL \u201cWriting for Pleasure\u201d by Ayd\u0131n Nurhan April 2004 My Dear Listeners, Today is our day for a farewell. We have been together, on and off the air, since more than a year now. As it is time to say good-bye, this week I chose a special topic for you. Today I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1323,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1055,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aydinnurhan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cWriting for Pleasure\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nAyd\u0131n Nurhan
\nApril 2004<\/p>\n
\nToday is our day for a farewell.<\/p>\n
\nAs it is time to say good-bye, this week I chose a special topic for you.
\nToday I want to talk to you on \u201cwriting for pleasure\u201d.
\nAs you may remember, long time ago I had talked to you about pleasure
\nreading.
\nAnd now I want to tell you about writing for pleasure.
\nIn my farewell speech, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you on
\nhow one evolves into being a journalist, how journalists contemplate and put
\ntheir ideas on paper and microphone.
\nMy dear friends,
\nAs you all know, we write for different reasons and occasions.
\nMost people write because they have to. We can call that compulsory
\nwriting.
\n18 Reflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\nWe may have to write to earn our bread, or write as a social duty to family
\nor friends.
\nAnd on the other side, we may write for personal pleasure, or psychological
\nrelief.
\nNow, we know many professional writers and artists who create for
\nearning a living. The need for decent living and earning money, does force an
\nartist to produce and be creative. Or else he may get lazy and lose creativity.
\nSo money is indeed an incentive in itself for creativity.
\nStill yet, I believe that art is for people who do not need to earn a living.
\nBut even rich artists need stress and incentive.
\nThey also need an internal discipline, and an education process of
\nreflection and contemplation.
\nWe can call this internal discipline positive stress.
\nAs both compulsory and pleasure creativity may lead to masterpieces of
\nart, still yet, I think the best art is art for pleasure. In art for money, there are
\ntime constraints which restrict the artist from the final touches to his creation.
\nWhereas in leasure, pleasure writing, the artist has all the time he needs to
\nelaborate for reaching perfection.
\nNow, after this lengthy introduction,
\nI would like to tell you how a career diplomat has turned into a journalist
\nand a radio programmer, a story especially for our youth, who may one day be
\ninterested in pleasure writing.
\nTo start with, let me correct a wrong image of career diplomats among
\nthe world community. Many a people portray us diplomats as high society
\nin perpetual vanity. Yet, apart from exceptions, diplomats have decent, quiet
\nfamily lives, and if they can find time away from endless official receptions
\nthey have to attend, they love to be home with their children.
\nThey value their families more than many other professionals, because
\ndiplomats are lonely people. Diplomats are like migrating birds. They are
\nlonely birds separated from their villages, hometowns, family and friends.
\nThese lone birds try to make new friends in every now post, then after
\na few years, again they are on the move. And in time, in a fatalistic spirit,
\nthey start accepting and liking loneliness, forced upon them by their very
\nprofession.
\nReflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\n19
\nAnd this feeling of loneliness also passes on to their children.
\nAnd for this very reason, my dear listeners, diplomats find friends in
\nbooks.
\nThe more they read, the more their minds get loaded, and one day comes,
\nas Rumi has said, \u201cfill up, so you can pour out\u201d, they need to discharge their
\nlaments, joys and their knowledge, on white paper. Yet, many of them have to
\nwait for retirement to do so.
\nBut rarely, some diplomats get a chance to take time out from their offices,
\nand if they want, they can use it for reflecting their ideas to the society. And I
\nam one of those few lucky who had that chance.
\nHow did I start writing?
\nFirst, I started writing my memoirs. I started putting my happiness, my
\nsorrows, hopes and despairs on white paper. White pages became my friends,
\nmy psychiatrist, my confidantes, especially when I felt lonely.
\nAfter some time, I started commenting on daily events and my daily
\npersonal experiences.
\nThen I transferred interesting ideas from the books I read, and started
\ncommenting on them, not to show them to anyone, but just for my own
\nintellectual exercise.
\nIn this story, I want to emphasize one point for beginners, and that is, I
\nnever paid attention to the mistakes I made. I mean I had the absolute freedom
\nto make mistakes. I did not care if my sentences were correct or not. I wrote
\njust as natural as it poured out of my mind.
\nAnd I wrote if I wanted, I quit, if I did not feel the need to write.
\nI was not accountable, I did not have any responsibility to anyone I wrote
\nwithout restriction of ideas or time.
\nYet as time went by, I figured out that I have developed a style, moreover,
\nreading and writing has started correcting my sentences.
\nAnd one day, I sent a thesis of mine on Turkish Culture, to one famous
\nTurkish poet\/thinker, Attila Ilhan. He first published my thesis in his newspaper
\ncolumn, then in his book on Turkish Culture. He also encouraged me to develop
\nmy thesis and write a book on it.
\n20 Reflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\nSee, my friends?
\nHow events develop as you start reading and writing?
\nThen I wrote a short book on Turkish Culture, and many intellectuals and
\npoliticians in Turkey read it.
\nThen, as I was Deputy Consul General in Chicago, one friend who came
\nto visit us, read by book, and offered me a column in his economical newspaper
\nin Turkey. So I took my first step into journalism, and started sending weekly
\narticles from Chicago under a pseudonym. In this deal, I gained experience,
\nand the newspaper gained money.
\nAnd then came the agreement between the Islamic Conference
\nOrganization and Jeddah Radio for the OIC Directors to make radio programs,
\nand I grasped the opportunity once again\u2026
\nThis is the story of a radio programmer\u2026
\nMy Dear Friends..
\nI think you already understood why I took so much of your time telling
\nmy story to you.
\nI wanted to give, especially to our young listeners the phases a writer
\npasses through in his intellectual evolution.
\nNow, to professional journalism..
\nIn newspaper business, space is restricted, so you are regularly warned on
\nwriting short articles. I did not get such warnings, because I do not like to build
\nfancy, long sentences, neither have I the ability to do so.
\nAs our forefathers have said, \u201cput everything necessary, nothing
\nunnecessary\u201d, I try to set things in shortest possible manner, and keep out
\nunnecessary rhetoric and details outside my essays.
\nWhereas in radio speeches, exactly the opposite is expected of you.
\nFor instance, in Turkish Section, we were expected to talk for nearly twenty
\nminutes, in English section a bit shorter. As professionals of this business
\nknow, a 20 minute radio speech is a 6 to 8 page thesis, a little conference. And
\nfor an intellectual to write such a thesis is a responsible and serious duty.
\nIn fact, newspaper journalism and radio broadcasting have both hardships
\nof their own. This also depends on the personality of the journalist. For
\ninstance, if you like to write short, substantial, compact ideas, then newspaper
\ncolumnism would suit you best.
\nReflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\n21
\nBut if you come especially from the culture of literature reading, then you
\ncan embellish your speeches with beautiful literature and adjectives, and write
\npages and pages, just for the sake of its artistic value.
\nYes my dear listeners,
\nAs we continue our chat on writing in this farewell speech of mine, let
\nus think of a journalist who has stopped writing for sometime. He uses his
\ntime for reading, reflection, and contemplation. And then the fresh new ideas,
\nelaborated over and over and matured in the brain, spill so smooth and natural
\nto the community.
\nYet, by time, the originality fades away, new ideas diminish, and the
\njournalist starts forcing his brain to create new ideas just to keep on writing.
\nNow, if he has the intellectual ethic and integrity, the most he can do after
\nbankrupting originality, he goes to archives and encyclopaedias and write
\ninformative articles. Yet these articles would be tasteless and without spirit.
\nThey do not reflect ideas that were well contemplated and matured, more,
\nturned into a thesis. They are crude ideas, not thought over, not matured, just
\nenforced on paper to get away with business.
\nShortly, they are not messages, passionate explosions of the mind that you
\ncannot stop from overflowing to the society.
\nTheses are intellectual orgasms, unstoppable, we exhale from our spirits
\nunto the community. These ideas explode unto paper in such way that once you
\nexhale them, you feel like a mother who has given birth to a new baby. And it
\nis a bliss.
\nAnd this unstoppable passion of the intellectual, after giving fantastic
\nbliss, can create serious problems for himself, as in illegal relation.
\nAnd my dear listeners,
\nWriting for pleasure is this kind of pouring out of pasion from the mind
\nof the intellectual.
\nAt this point, I would recall the movie \u201cAmadeus\u201d with seven Oscars
\nwhich is about the life of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
\nIn the movie, Mozart undertakes to write an opera with a certain deadline.
\nTime goes by, but there is no preparation, no notes on paper. As deadline
\napproaches, the patrons knock Mozart\u2019s door, and want to see preparations. At
\nthat moment, Mozart shows his head with his index finger saying \u201chere\u201d.
\n22 Reflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\nYes, in fact, the notes have been shaping in Mozart\u2019s mind, and matured
\nto pour out on paper. A grand opera has formed in the mind of the genious, and
\nafter that, writing of the opera takes a short time for him.
\nWith this example, what I want to convey to you is that, an idea or an
\nartistic concept first drops to the mind as a seed, then blossoms, matures, and
\nas the fruit falls from the branch of a tree, falls from the mind unto paper as an
\narticle, a poem or picture, or musical notes.
\nAnd once delivered, the pain of maternal delivering ends.
\nThese examples are for ideal art, for pleasure.
\nYet life is much different than this.
\nPerhaps hundreds of thousands of people have to write to earn their bread.
\nIn many countries, newspaper columnists have a compulsory duty to find a
\ntopic for every single day to write about.
\nIn reality, not one brain can create an original idea for every 24 hours.
\nHow can a passionate idea, to be spilled into the community build every 24
\nhours in a mind?
\nWhat happens then, is writing for bread, for ordinary artisanship.
\nThis is why, in Western world, many columnists do not write daily columns.
\nThe ones who write every day are real top brains. I read them continually, even
\nthey cannot be original every day.
\nSame attitude goes for university professors. If academics do not renew
\nthemselves in time, they become monotonous like highschool teachers who
\nteach from the books ordered upon them.
\nThis is why the Western universities have established a good tradition
\ncalled \u201cSabbatics\u201d which gives professors time for refreshment.
\nIn this system, a professor can go to another university to live alone, and
\ndo research on what he wants, away from daily teaching hurdles. He is given a
\nsecretary and uses libraries and resources, contemplates, reflects, refreshes his
\nknowledge, and after a year, is born again with fresh ideas.
\nJournalism is similar in nature. One reads for long time, produces new
\nideas, then for a year or two, he presents his ideas to the society, then, when
\nthe ideas that sprout from his spirit into the society finish, then he starts acting
\nas a merchant.
\nReflections of a Turkish Ambassador
\n23
\nAt such point, one feels the need to stop writing, start reading, and develop
\nfresh, original ideas.
\nYet the life is real, journalists have to earn their living, neither them, nor
\ntheir papers can afford such luxury. This is perhaps one reason why articles
\nin our papers do not come to a certain clout and originality in international
\nintellectual fora.
\nYes, my dear friends,
\nIt is time for me too, to have sabbatics, an intellectual vacation for
\nreflection and contemplation.
\nI discharged my ideas that had built in my mind through years, shared
\nthem with you, always keeping in my mind that I was serving my ummah, I
\nhad to say good for my ummah, say good for humanity, for the future of our
\ninnocent children.
\nI do not have any more to say now, It is time to fill again.
\nAs I bid you farewell, let me pay a duty of mine, a duty of gratitude.
\nThe Saudi Arabian Radio entrusted its microphones to a brotherly Turkish
\nDiplomat. My speeches were not censured, and I had full freedom of the topic
\nto choose, full freedom of context to say.
\nMy honourable response was to write with utmost honesty, with the
\nresponsibilty of a muslim Turkish diplomat, who had taken an oath to work for
\nhis ummah, and the mission to strenthen sentiments and solidarity among our
\nbrotherly OIC countries.
\nLast but not least, I thank Mr. Omar, Director General of Jeddah Radio, Ms.
\nHanan, Head of International Broadcasting Section, her assistant Mrs. Samar
\nFatany, and our beloved studio engineers for their continual encouragement
\nand support for me.
\nAnd above all, I thank you my dear listeners, brothers and sisters for being
\nwith us for since some time.
\nMay Allah bless you, and humanity for ever.
\n24 Reflections of a Turkish Ambassador<\/p>\n