mercy and value of the homeland. The reason for the intimate connection between my fate and the fate of my homeland is the similarity between them. When, after leaving my family and brothers, I was left feeling isolated and bereft, the homeland was afflicted in the same way. I was deeply affected and became as homesick as the soldiers and heroes separated from their homeland.

When I walked the route from the village of Gypjak to the city of Aşgabat, between Büzmeýin and Ymam Kasym graveyard, I would sense the loneliness of the homeland, its homelessness and its spiritual desolation.

The bleak steppes, the desolate plains, the shrivelled fountains, the bowed cypresses, the disintegrating buildings, the lonely homeland, in their entirety, all these do not exist only outside me but live too in my internal realm, where they cause my heart to ache.

The homeland reminds me of a woman who has been slapped and abandoned in the street.

The resemblance between my fate and that of my homeland almost pushed me into philosophical inquiries. For the first condition of philosophical inquiry is emotional exploration.

 The human is like an instrument created by Allah to detect the passage of time. The human differs from other living beings in that, as a result of having mind, he possesses the ability to know time.

In our era, the 20^th century, people only perceived the passage of time too late when they realized they had not done what they ought to have done. They regretted the chances they had missed and the things they had neglected to do. Their