Between 1889 and 1900, excavations carried out in the Nippur region by teams working on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Hilprecht’s name is often associated with these digs) brought thousands of cuneiform tablets to light. Under the rules of the time, the finds were handed over to the Ottoman state; in other words, during the reign of the Ottoman sultan on the throne then, these artifacts entered Istanbul’s official collections and were eventually gathered under the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

Among those tablets, one piece that seemed “unimportant” waited quietly for years in storerooms and drawers, until researchers began to examine the Istanbul collection tablet by tablet. And when the meaning of this piece was finally understood, everything changed: because the text turned out to be a passionate love poem, spoken in a woman’s voice and addressed to the Sumerian king Shu-Sin (Su-Sin). In Turkey, one of the best-known figures who brought the story of this text to a wider audience through her work on Sumerian tablets is Muazzez İlmiye Çığ; some accounts also especially note that Hatice Kızılay was involved in taking up the text.

Over time, a “palace story” formed around the poem: that during the Sumerian New Year festival, a strikingly beautiful priestess caught the king’s eye, succeeded in marrying him, and on their wedding day, burning with love, wrote this poem for him; that it was so admired in the palace it was later set to music by the most famous masters of the era and spread among the people. However much the details may have turned into legend, the heart of the poem is unmistakably clear: a love that calls out “bridegroom,” a longing to touch, admiration, and surrender.

And here are those lines:

bridegroom, beloved of my heart,
your beauty is abundant, sweet as honey
you have bewitched me,
let me stand trembling before you,
bridegroom, let me caress you,
my precious caresses are sweeter than honey,
grant me your caresses,
my lord, my god,
my lord, my rapture,
my Shu-Sin, who delights Enlil’s heart,
grant me your caresses.

Today, this 4,000-year-old text may be described as “the world’s first love letter,” but in essence it is accepted as one of the oldest love poems, and it remains in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. And even after thousands of years, what hits you is this: stone and clay are hard, but the feeling written into them is soft; eras change, empires fall, names fade… yet a sentence that rose from someone’s heart can still stay alive, even in cuneiform.

The film is based on The Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur, a classic Akkadian/Babylonian story preserved on a clay tablet discovered at Sultantepe in south-east Türkiye (near Şanlıurfa). Using that ancient source as their script, the Cambridge team staged the story in Babylonian, turning a piece of cuneiform literature into a surprisingly watchable—and genuinely fascinating—short film.

 

A Book That Keeps Echoing In My Head

It’s been a few days since I finished Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, but the sentences still echo in my mind. Honestly, reading it felt like a kind of awakening. I sat down and read it in one go, but I kept stopping on page after page, thinking: “This is exactly what I’ve been feeling—he’s just saying it far better than I ever could.”

From The Discipline Society To The Performance Society

Han’s central claim is this: the century we live in is no longer what Foucault described for the twentieth century as a “discipline society.” The discipline society shaped people through institutions—hospitals, barracks, prisons, factories—by drawing strict borders and repeating the logic of “no, you can’t; not like that—like this.” It was a world of clear prohibitions and visible limits.

So what do we have now? We have a “achievement society” or a “performance society.” And its typical subject is no longer the obedient subject, but the achievement subject.

The Freedom Paradox: Master And Slave At Once

This is where the real turning point begins. The achievement subject believes they are free. No one is standing over them, shouting orders. In fact, the message they hear everywhere is the opposite:

“You can do it.”
“Everything is possible.”
“You’re special.”
“Unlock your potential.”

But Han argues that this creates a freedom paradox. There is no external master anymore—yet as the person becomes their own master, they also become their own slave.

Because somewhere inside us, there is a voice that never stops demanding more:
“Do better.”
“Move faster.”
“Be more productive.”
“Why are you stopping?”

That voice becomes so dominant that we stop giving ourselves permission to rest.

The Illnesses Of The 21st Century: Not Viral, But Neural

One of the book’s sharpest observations is this: the illnesses of the twenty-first century are not primarily bacterial or viral. They are neuronal—they live in the nervous system.

Depression, burnout, attention disorders, borderline personality disorder… Han frames these not as random personal failures, but as symptoms tied to overstimulation, information overload, and the endless pressure to perform. He calls this “neuronal violence.” What drains us isn’t a virus attacking from the outside—it’s the relentless assault on the mind from within the logic of constant achievement.

What Happened To Our Days?

While reading, I couldn’t help thinking about how our daily lives have been reshaped.

We wake up and immediately reach for the phone. Dozens of notifications. Messages. A never-ending stream. We eat breakfast while scrolling Instagram, reading the news, checking work emails—often all at once.

We even brag about “multitasking.” But Han calls it a kind of regression. In the wild, animals must constantly split attention—watching for predators, tracking prey, protecting offspring. In that sense, multitasking resembles a pre-civilized survival mode.

What makes us human is something else: deep attention, contemplation, the ability to stay with a thought long enough for it to unfold.

The Collapse Of Deep Attention

So what are we doing instead? We’re slowly destroying that capacity.

We begin to expect stimulation at every moment. We want to consume something constantly. We fear empty space. We fear boredom.

And this is where Han says something that feels almost offensive at first—until it starts to make sense: deep boredom can be the birthplace of creativity, thought, and genuine existence.

Nietzsche’s line fits perfectly here: “Idleness is the beginning of all psychology.”
Time spent doing nothing—simply being, letting thoughts wander—can become the most fertile kind of time.

The Tyranny Of “Yes”

But we’ve lost that luxury. Modern life trains us to feel like we must always be doing, producing, achieving. And that’s why we break.

In this view, depression isn’t just sadness. It’s the moment the person who feels compelled to achieve reaches a point where they can’t do anything anymore. It’s what happens when the world becomes so saturated with positivity—so full of “yes”—that the capacity to say “no” quietly disappears.

The Smooth World And Its Hidden Violence

Another concept Han uses is the idea of the “smooth.” Our society wants a world without friction: no obstacles, no resistance, no rough edges. Everything should be easy, fast, convenient.

But Han says the smooth is also wounding. Because friction, resistance, difficulty—these are often what shape us, mature us, deepen us. Without them, we don’t simply become comfortable; we become flatter.

A Simple Solution That’s Hard To Live

So what do we do?

Han’s answer is simple in theory and difficult in practice: rediscover vita contemplativa—the contemplative life. Take a real breath. Turn off the phone. Shut the laptop. Learn how to do nothing again.

Look at the sky. Watch leaves move in the wind. Create time that has no goal, produces nothing, achieves nothing—time that is only about being.

My Decision: Thirty Minutes Of Nothing

After finishing the book, I made a decision: every day, I’ll spend at least half an hour doing nothing. No phone. No computer. No book.

Maybe I’ll sit. Maybe I’ll walk. I’ll let my mind move on its own. Maybe I’ll feel bored. Maybe my thoughts will scatter. But maybe—right there, in that empty space—something creative will finally surface.

Who knows?

Try It

Try it too. Even now, while reading this, you might be checking your phone on the side. Put it down.

Finish this piece—and then do nothing for ten minutes. Just ten.

Watch what happens.

Maybe you’ll meet that inner voice. Maybe you’ll start to notice how the logic of The Burnout Society isn’t only “out there,” but working quietly inside you.

What Is The Judas Kiss?

In Christian tradition, during the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him. That betrayer is Judas Iscariot.

Not long after, Judas leads armed men to Jesus. The key detail is simple but chilling: the soldiers may not clearly recognize Jesus in the dark, in a crowd, among men dressed similarly. So Judas sets up a method in advance: the person he kisses will be the one they should arrest.

When they corner Jesus and the disciples, Judas approaches, greets him, and kisses him on the cheek. In that instant, the kiss stops being a sign of affection and becomes a message: “This is the one.” The soldiers identify Jesus and seize him.

Caravaggio - The Taking of Christ -1602

Why This Detail Hits So Hard

The reason this story sticks is not just betrayal, but the way betrayal is delivered. A kiss is normally a signal of trust. Here, it becomes a tracking marker. The act looks warm from the outside, but its function is ice-cold: a friendly gesture used to expose someone to their enemies.

That reversal is the core of the motif. The kiss stays the same, but the meaning flips completely.

A Parallel Motif: Samson And Delilah

Stories like this often share a brutal pattern: destruction doesn’t begin with an enemy’s strength, but with a breach from within. In the Samson and Delilah story, Samson trusts someone close, reveals what he shouldn’t, and that intimacy becomes the doorway to his downfall.

The situations aren’t identical, but the mechanism is familiar: trust becomes leverage, and closeness becomes the tool that ends you.

Lucas Cranach the Elder - Samson and Delilah (1530)

The Judas Tree Legend

Around the Judas story, folklore grows—because people can’t resist giving betrayal a physical symbol. One popular legend says Judas, overwhelmed by guilt after the crucifixion, hangs himself from a redbud tree, sometimes called the Judas tree in tradition.

A Sixteenth Century Fresco From Tarzhishte Monastery, Strupets, Bulgaria, Showing Judas Hanging Himself as Described in Matthew 27:1–10

Another layer of the legend claims the tree once bloomed white, but after Judas’ act it began to bloom purple, as if stained by sin and blood. This isn’t history in a strict sense; it’s myth doing what myth does best: turning a moral shock into a permanent image.

Now Connect It To The Godfather: The Modern Version Of The Motif

This is where the story stops being only theological and becomes a reusable cultural weapon. Because the mechanics are so powerful, popular storytelling keeps borrowing them: a gesture of intimacy becomes a public signal of betrayal.

That’s why so many people connect the Judas Kiss to the most famous “kiss” in The Godfather Part II. When Michael Corleone realizes the truth about Fredo, he pulls him close in a crowd and kisses him. To outsiders it can look like family affection. But the subtext is unmistakable: “I know.”

In mafia lore and film language, this is often framed as the kiss of death: the moment someone is not just confronted, but marked. Again, the power is in the contrast. No shouting. No violence on screen. Just a familiar gesture carrying an irreversible verdict.

The Point: Same Gesture, Darker Function

The Judas Kiss and The Godfather’s kiss land in the same place because they run on the same engine: betrayal delivered through intimacy. The gesture doesn’t change. The context does. And that’s what makes it terrifying.

A kiss can mean love. Or it can mean identification, exposure, and the beginning of the end.

You know the moment: Jack Dawson sits there trying to keep it together while Rose poses, and the air is basically charged with awkwardness, adrenaline, and “I cannot believe this is happening.” The camera cuts to the charcoal moving across the paper… and that’s where the real behind-the-scenes trick begins.

Those Hands Aren’t DiCaprio’s

In the close-up shots where you actually see the drawing being made, the hands you’re watching are James Cameron’s hands, not Leonardo DiCaprio’s. Cameron is a longtime sketcher and illustrator, and he personally created the famous portrait used in the film.

Bonus detail that makes it even funnier: Kate Winslet wasn’t actually nude while being sketched—she posed in a bathing suit for the drawing reference. 

Jack Dawson’s Drawing of Rose DeWitt Bukater — photographed at the James Cameron Art Exhibition.

The Handedness Problem

Here’s the mechanical snag: Cameron is left-handed, but Jack is shown drawing as a right-handed artist. So if they filmed Cameron normally, the motion wouldn’t match the character on screen.

The Simple Trick That Sold The Illusion

To solve it, Cameron used a clean visual cheat: he placed a finished sketch (or a clean reference copy) on a lit surface and filmed himself copying it in a way that could be mirrored later. Once the footage was flipped in post, it reads as right-handed drawing, perfectly matching Jack.

It’s the kind of solution that feels almost too simple—until you realize it’s exactly why it works: no fancy VFX, just smart camera logic.

Jack Dawson’s Drawing of Rose DeWitt Bukater — photographed at the James Cameron Art Exhibition.

Bonus: The Terminator Fever Dream Sketches

As a fun extra layer, you can tie this to Cameron’s wider “artist brain” habit: he’s known for visualizing ideas through drawings and concept sketches—sometimes sparked by intense, half-delirious inspiration—long before the final film exists.

Concept Sketch for The Terminator — Photographed at The James Cameron Art Exhibition.

A Cameron Quote To End On

Cameron has a quote that fits this whole vibe perfectly:

“There are many talented people who haven't fulfilled their dreams because they over thought it, or they were too cautious, and were unwilling to make the leap of faith.”

Small Correction (Because It’s Too Good Not To Fix)

The “born in America” punchline is funny, but for Cameron the real version is sharper: he was born in Canada and moved to California at 17, which is basically “entering the ecosystem” at the exact age where obsession can turn into a career.