Covering past sorrows with the joy of the future

I tried to enter the New Year with hope and joy. 

Two significant, esteemed and treasured people of the literature world, writer Aslı Erdoğan and writer and linguist Necmiye Alpay have been freed from prison. We wish the same for the rest of the literary and press world. 

We live in such a region that it is always half of the joy that falls into our share. Following a fun night, the time it takes next day to overcome the drowsiness changes from one person to the other.  

As a poet has once said, after health comes problem; after love comes separation. There are those who feel some kind of resentment after fun and entertainment. 

The losses of the past year, full of terrorism and a coup attempt, are on our minds, but our souls should not be fixated on them. "Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness," Andre Gide has once said. Let us be committed to forgetting, let us make plans for the future instead of accounting for the past. 

Let us read optimistic poems, let us engage ourselves in music. 

Well, who and what would provide this optimism? They are artists and art. 

Several shows have been cancelled; I hope this year, sorrows will not cause the same. Good concerts should not be cancelled; on such days, they will save us from living the pain of today.   

Those who take over governance after wars, the first thing they do are to repair concert and opera halls, because the secret sound of consolation is in those places. 

How did last year pass? Indeed, the answer to this has a national and individual layer. Those who died and those who were killed, those who lost their freedoms… Let us leave our sorrows behind…

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