I Will Never See the World Again

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As someone who has been thrown into the dirty, swelling waves of reality, I can comfortably say that the victims of reality are those so-called smart people who believe that you have to act in accordance with it. Through the peephole I could see six policemen on the landing, sporting the vests worn by counterterrorism teams during house raids, the acronym ‘TEM’ stamped in large letters on their chests. Qiangzi used this time to prepare Zhang as best he could for the task ahead. Because of his blindness, Zhang had no way of anticipating danger in the Himalayas, where the terrain is always changing and icefalls can occur at any moment. The guide made sure his charge understood that his previous training would count for little once the expedition began. Betts is doing a PhD at Yale in law, so his poems contain a wealth of personal, social and intellectual perspectives. His viewpoint is also informed by working through his own conflicting feelings about the justice system. When he got out of prison, his mother told him that she had been raped whilst waiting for a bus. Today, Betts believes that mass incarceration is a social evil, but he also thinks that the harms of certain crimes get lost if we only talk about justice as an issue in mass incarceration. Betts is not someone you should read if you want easy answers: that’s what makes him one of the most essential voices about questions of crime and punishment. The COVID-19 pandemic put Zhang’s plans on hold for an entire year. But in March, climbing at Everest finally resumed and Zhang boarded a flight from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to Kathmandu, Nepal.

Instinctively, I was trying to hold on to the idea of death. The eternity of death has the power to trivialize even the most terrifying moments of life. To me, the evidence suggests that we are unlikely to have free will. If we do, it is only in rare moments of herculean strength or at times when our environmental conditions are on our side. But, like you, my concerns with free will scepticism is what it would do to our motivation and view of the world if we really took it into our ethics. What would we gain and what would we lose? speaks for itself with such clarity, certainty and wisdom that only one thing needs to be said: read it. And then read it again." - The Guardian Yasemin Çongar is the co-founder and general director of P24, a nonprofit platform for independent journalism in Istanbul. She is also the founder of K24, a Turkish literary review, and, most recently, the Istanbul Literature House. An editor, essayist, and translator, Çongar is the author of four books in Turkish. At a turn in the road, the car stopped and we got out. We walked through a door into a large underground hall.

That’s what Jean-Paul Sartre wrote. I don’t know how accurate that was. Sartre’s biography, Saint Genet says exactly that, that all these kids called him ‘thief’ and he decided to accept the term and relish it. But I think Genet rejected the book as an account of him. It’s an interesting book about existentialism, but I don’t think it’s likely to be very accurate about the psychology of the man Genet. A failed Turkish coup d’état attempt on July 15, 2016 caused President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to overreact. More than 150,000 people were fired from their jobs, detained or arrested. One of those arrested was Ahmet Altan. He had appeared on a television program the day before the coup attempt. Turkish prosecutors claimed that he had given ‘subliminal messages’ in favor of the coup on the program. On February 16th, a Turkish court sentenced the novelist and former newspaper editor to life imprisonment without parole. I was surrounded by the horrible sounds of icefalls,” says Zhang. “It was nature warning me that Mount Everest is totally different from other mountains.” Update: Nov 6, 2019. Ahmet Altan was released from prison today after a retrial, but three of his co-defendants – Fevzi Yazıcı, Yakup Şimşek and Şükrü Tuğrul Özşengül, as do many other writers and journalists.

Stepping on a flat floor at home is nothing like walking on the ground outside,” says Zhang, “Everest, with its irregular terrain of icy cliffs and crevices, is another thing altogether.”I think some people in prison put a lot of faith in personal agency. Once, I was talking to them about Gregg Caruso’s free will scepticism and his idea that we should see crime as a public health issue rather than looking at it with the lens of moral responsibility. A lot of them reacted by saying ‘No, I’ve put myself in prison, I can get myself out.’ Put together from papers found among notes Altan gave to his lawyers, and translated – superbly – into English by his friend Yasemin Çongar, I Will Never See the World Again is deeply satisfying in form. It is not Midnight Express; it is not From the House of the Dead, and it is not De Profundis. In a sense, it eclipses all of these. It is a radiant celebration of the inner resources of human beings, above all those triggered by the imagination. Its account of the creative process is sublime, among the most perfectly expressed analyses of that perpetually elusive phenomenon. And it is a triumph of the spirit. “You can imprison me but you cannot keep me here. Because, like all writers, I have magic,” Altan says in his final phrases. “I can pass through your walls with ease.” Yes: but enough is enough. He is still in prison. Eighty Nobel prize-winners have protested, unsuccessfully. We must move heaven and earth to spring him. Ahmet Altan is a Turkish writer and journalist that was detained and then received a life sentence because he was believed to have taken part of the failed military coup that tried to overthrow Erdogan's regime in 2016 Turkey. Reflecting on his arrest and his experiences on the inside, Ahmet succeeded in transporting his readers to his heart wrenching new life as a writer behind bars. Beyond the horrors of prison life, Ahmet gave us valuable lessons about the resilience of the human spirit and the power of books and writing in creating freedom within one’s mind.

Readers may have followed the furore over the statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, erected to honour the writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights near her erstwhile home in Newington Green, North London. Ever since it was unveiled in November – the result of a ten-year-long campaign led by the writer Bee Lowlatt – it has caused controversy and fired debate. These moments of masculine vulnerability are all the more powerful when you think that 93.5% of prisoners in the US are men (in the UK the number is 95%). Masculinities are a huge factor in crime. Prisons themselves are hothouses of patriarchy, predicated on domination, hierarchy and violence. Betts writes about his sons. He’s aware that soon they will become men. When he was on the brink of becoming a man, he did something violent and went to prison. It’s painful because children often offer parents a vicarious experience of innocence, but unable to forget that he is a felon, Betts is anticipating how he is going to have to tell his sons about the things men do, particularly the things men do to women. At the time, the idea sounded ludicrous — even to Zhang himself. “I had never seen a snowy mountain before and I didn’t have any experience of outdoor sports,” he says. Me jeter en prison était dans vos cordes; mais aucune de vos cordes ne sera jamais assez puissante pour m'y retenir. This book is one of the most powerful books I have read. Maybe because of his situation but mostly because of Altman’s attitude. It’s funny. It’s very wise. It is very humane. It mad me mad but also made me stop and reflect. I always thought the two things the made the world a worse place is politics and religion. We need them but all to often, they are used for the wrong reasons. We are living in this time.Once Qiangzi had left, the ascent became even more challenging. Zhang, who couldn’t speak English, struggled to communicate with the Sherpas. The instructions narrowed down to one word: “Up.”