Yer Çekimine En Fazla Direnen Şey Yaşam

Yer Çekimine En Fazla Direnen Şey Yaşam

Milliyet Pazar — 23 June 2019
Interview by Adalet Çavdar

In June 2019, Nejat İşler had just published his second book, Ben Hep Senin Yanındaydım.

Unlike the later Socrates interview, which explores the history of his writing and its relationship with acting, this Milliyet Pazar conversation stays much closer to the philosophical world inside the stories.

Success.

Luck.

Masculinity.

Social decay.

Revolution.

The difficulty of changing a life.

At the center is one of İşler’s most memorable metaphors:

life is the thing that resists gravity most strongly.

It is heavy.

That is why people often accept the lives they already have instead of trying to lift them into another form.

Success Can Be Poison

The interview begins with a character who appears successful and fortunate.

İşler immediately complicates the word “success.”

For someone concerned with eternity or with touching ordinary lives, he says, conventional success can become temporary and deceptive.

Even poisonous.

This is a striking formulation because İşler is speaking from inside a highly successful career.

He is not criticizing something he never obtained.

He has already experienced:

recognition,

money,

major roles,

fame.

And still considers success an unreliable measure.

Luck Creates Moral Discomfort

İşler openly calls himself fortunate.

But he immediately adds two qualifications.

First, he worked extremely hard to create some of that fortune.

Second, being fortunate does not automatically make happiness easy when other people remain unlucky.

This is consistent with the moral direction visible since 2016.

Privilege creates a question:

what do you do with it?

Success Is Not Innocent

This makes success morally complicated.

If success simply meant:

I won,

the story would end there.

For İşler, success creates awareness of unequal outcomes.

Why me?

Why not somebody else?

What does being lucky require of the lucky person?

These questions help explain why contribution becomes increasingly important in his post-illness life.

A Useful Comparison with 2012

In the Marie Claire interview, İşler was unsure what “success” even meant.

Seven years later, the uncertainty has matured into criticism.

Success exists.

But it may be deceptive if it becomes the main purpose of life.

That is a much stronger position.

Writing Men

Ben Hep Senin Yanındaydım contains stories told largely through male voices.

This gives Adalet Çavdar an opportunity to ask İşler directly about masculinity.

His answer is provocative.

He links part of modern male crisis to the moment when women increasingly began earning money and the old male role as sole provider weakened.

The important issue is not whether this historical explanation is complete.

It is what İşler identifies as the crisis:

men losing an inherited reason for existence.

Masculinity as a Social Job

Traditional masculinity often told men:

provide,

protect,

earn,

control.

If women can independently perform the economic role, the male identity built entirely around provision becomes unstable.

Then a question appears:

If being a man is not simply bringing money home, what is it?

That question sits underneath many of the male characters İşler has played.

The Collapse of the Old Male Script

This makes the conversation especially relevant to:

Kayıbedenler Kulübü,

Barda,

Ercüment,

and later Tamirhane.

Many of İşler’s memorable male characters are men whose inherited scripts no longer work.

They respond differently:

withdrawal,

violence,

irony,

control,

friendship,

self-destruction.

His fiction appears interested in the same instability.

“Let’s Produce Beautiful Things Together”

Despite using deliberately confrontational language while discussing relations between men and women, İşler ultimately arrives at cooperation rather than gender war.

His conclusion is much simpler:

produce good things together.

That ending matters more than the provocation.

The solution is not restoring an older male hierarchy.

It is finding another form of coexistence.

Another Version of Barda’s Question

This unexpectedly connects the interview to Barda.

In 2007, the broad question was:

why can we not live together?

In 2019, gender provides another version:

how do men and women live together after older roles stop functioning?

The subject changes.

The coexistence problem remains.

Social Decay as Hamlet

One of the stories in the book, İşler explains, is actually a Hamlet adaptation.

He had carried the idea for years while trying to understand where such a story would fit within Turkey.

Eventually he found the social logic he needed.

This is a valuable insight into his writing method.

He does not merely transfer a classic plot.

He waits until the structure finds a local reality.

Adaptation Requires Geography

This fits his wider belief that fiction must be connected with lived knowledge.

A story cannot simply be placed anywhere.

The social world must support it.

The question becomes:

what does Denmark’s corruption become here?

What family?

What power structure?

What form of decay?

“Everywhere We Look, We See Decay”

The interview’s discussion of the Hamlet-like story centers on corruption spreading through ordinary life.

The idea resembles a recurring theme in İşler’s acting career:

social darkness rarely arrives as an isolated monster.

It becomes environmental.

People exist inside systems that normalize it.

Life Is Heavy

Then comes the interview’s central metaphor.

Asked what people can do when accidents and circumstances shape life without permission, İşler describes life as extraordinarily heavy.

Something that strongly resists being lifted.

That is why people often accept what happens.

The metaphor is unusually effective.

Gravity as Habit

Gravity does not need to persuade.

It simply pulls.

Habit works similarly.

Job.

Home.

Relationship.

Status.

Routine.

People may dislike these structures and still remain because changing them requires energy.

The familiar has weight.

Resistance Requires Lift

İşler then reverses the metaphor.

Human history, he says, has been changed by people who resisted gravity:

those who flew,

escaped,

refused the existing weight.

This is one of his more optimistic statements.

Change is difficult.

Not impossible.

His Own Biography Fits the Metaphor

The metaphor almost reads like an accidental summary of his own life.

Television had gravity.

Istanbul had gravity.

Fame had gravity.

Property had gravity.

Career had gravity.

For years, İşler tried to reduce their pull.

Leave the series.

Move.

Write.

Build another daily life.

Choose shorter work.

The archive is full of attempts to resist structures that become too heavy.

Buying Time Is Also Resisting Gravity

This creates a strong connection with his older philosophy.

“Buy time” sounds economic.

“Resist gravity” sounds existential.

But they describe a similar process.

Both involve reducing the force of things that keep a person inside unwanted routines.

Another World?

The final story in the book leads to an explicitly political and philosophical question:

Is another world actually possible?

İşler’s answer depends on how people interpret existence.

Those who experience being alive only as burden may reproduce the same tired world.

He places more hope in people capable of experiencing life as a gift and moving beyond obsessive self-importance.

Self-Transcendence

The important contrast is:

people who constantly center themselves

versus

people capable of moving beyond themselves.

This strongly resembles his 2016 moral shift.

Then:

I do not want to live only for myself.

Now:

the people who can move beyond themselves may be the ones capable of changing the world.

Faith in a Younger Generation

İşler says he believes such a generation already exists and wants to walk with them as much as he can.

This continues the thread first strongly visible around Gezi and Gümüşlükspor.

He does not describe himself as the leader of youth.

Again, he wants to accompany and support.

2016: Not a Role Model

This is consistent with his refusal of role-model status.

The mature position is not:

follow me.

It is:

I see something valuable in younger people and want to move with them.

The direction of authority is reversed.

The Writer Is Shy

Asked why he does not take greater risks with writing after demonstrating his ability, İşler gives an unexpectedly simple explanation:

he is shy.

This matters because his public persona suggests almost the opposite.

Bold.

Provocative.

Unafraid.

But creative exposure produces another form of vulnerability.

Acting Hides Behind a Character

This may help explain why writing feels different.

An actor can say:

the character did it.

The script said it.

The director chose it.

Writing has less protection.

The page is more directly associated with the writer.

That can make literary risk feel more personal than acting risk.

Another Public/Private Contradiction

Once again:

public Nejat appears fearless.

Writer Nejat describes himself as hesitant.

The contradiction is useful.

Courage is contextual.

Someone can be bold socially and cautious artistically.

The First Book Versus the Second

The second book is a meaningful step because İşler moves more fully into fiction.

The 2019 Socrates interview later explains that he was dissatisfied with parts of Gerçek Hesap Bu! and wanted to move away from the interview-like structure.

This Milliyet conversation catches the artistic result.

Now the stories themselves carry the philosophy.

From Talking About Life to Constructing Lives

This marks an important development.

In the first book, İşler often works close to memoir and conversation.

In the second, he increasingly builds characters and situations.

The writer begins to do what the actor has always done:

enter another person’s internal world.

Acting and Fiction Meet

This may be why his fiction and acting become structurally similar.

Both require asking:

What does this person want?

What happened to them?

What do they believe?

Why does their behavior make sense from inside?

The tools overlap.

A Useful Comparison with Socrates

The two 2019 interviews should remain separate.

Milliyet Pazar:

What do the stories mean?

Success.

Masculinity.

Decay.

Life.

Change.

Socrates:

Where did the writer come from?

Childhood.

Typewriter.

Atıf Yılmaz.

Sahaflar.

Acting.

Gümüşlükspor.

One is philosophical.

The other is biographical.

A Useful Comparison with 2007

The 2007 Ulusoy interview says:

money should buy time.

The 2019 interview says:

life is heavy and difficult to move.

Together they produce a remarkably coherent philosophy.

Freedom requires resources.

But it also requires the willingness to lift the weight of habit.

A Useful Comparison with 2016

2016 asks:

what should remain after I die?

2019 asks:

what kind of person can actually change the world?

The answer in both cases moves away from self-centered life.

Contribution becomes increasingly important.

A Useful Comparison with 2025

By Miras, the scale becomes more intimate again.

Instead of changing the world, the late İşler asks what one person actually leaves behind.

The answer is largely:

memory.

This creates a progression:

2016: contribute.

2019: move beyond yourself.

2025: leave good memories.

The ambition gradually becomes smaller and more human.

Why This Interview Matters

The 23 June 2019 Milliyet Pazar interview is one of the strongest records of Nejat İşler as a writer rather than simply an actor who has published a book.

Its most powerful image is gravity.

Life is heavy.

People often accept existing conditions because lifting life into another form requires enormous effort.

Yet history changes when somebody resists that weight.

The metaphor connects almost perfectly with the rest of the archive.

İşler’s life repeatedly involves attempts to reduce the gravity of:

career,

television,

fame,

property,

place,

expectation.

The interview also deepens his thinking about success.

Success is not automatically good.

Luck creates responsibility.

Masculinity is unstable.

And meaningful change may require people to move beyond constant concern with themselves.

Perhaps the central late-2010s question is no longer simply:

How do I become free?

It is:

What should freedom be used for?