No spoilers really.
Getting Heavier
Gol D. Roger admitted that it wasn’t his time. History demonstrates that it takes time for parties to sort things out. Musk said people don’t change their minds, they die.
I think these seemingly irrelevant pieces share a focal point. These all have to do with tides dictating waves. It’s not necessarily that people are hopelessly stubborn, incapable, or plain stupid to be unable to change their minds. As we grow past the malleable youth, past events become layers of your own skin. For Insun’s mother, the suppression that she and her family lived through became a part of her. The will to find her brother became a dictating force of life. That became her fire. To extinguish that fire and move on could be as excruciating and impossible as overcoming death. The past then became her entirety. When this happens on a regional scale, it becomes the dictating ethos, the watering down of which is only enabled by the replacement of its members.
On a similar note, I used to think that I could do anything. I’m gradually moving away from that idea as the past starts to coalesce on my skin as corals collect on a reef. It is as gradual as the buildup of sediments in fluid-carrying pipes. It’s like the adhesive balls that Mr. Incredible was showered with. Small at first, but engulfing not before long. Another example is the difficulty of unlearning. They say in golf, it is harder to shed bad form than learn new ones. I have felt that the education I received were not optimized for the current climate. I simultaneously feel lucky that I managed to realign myself, but I also see the apparent difficulty. Who knows how many more waves are there to come, and how many series of adaptations one could go through.
Attack on Titans, the Middle Ages, the wars in the Middle East show how hard it is to be free from the past. When the past inevitably takes up too much of the present, the engine that manifests the dawn of the future gets overburdened. The engines for individuals, generations, nations, races, and humanity can get too heavy.
Someone said we don’t have all the time. We are currently incredibly blessed to be in a narrow window with the capacity to actually manifest future. I agree. Humanity spent decades and centuries experimenting, and dealing with the experimentation side-effects. Barnacles drape the crews of the Flying Dutchman. I face the mirror to find a little more wrinkly hardened crusts of time day by day. It’s building up. It’s getting heavy. I haven’t been suppressed nearly as much as Insun’s family. But nonetheless, I think I can understand the logistics of how that would make one fall into despair.
A lonely contemplative narrater
is hard to bear. I have enough thoughts on my own. The book is the world seen through Kyungha’s eyes. The only other person is Insun. Accounts of interviewees including Insun’s mother takes up a good portion, but I found the book to be mainly the narration of Kyungha’s introspective thoughts, or a delineation of what has been projected on her retina, especially in the earlier part of the book. I found it too slow. I felt it could have been alleviated by a trimmed, disinterested narration, and more dialogue with other characters. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch which addressed a hypothetical political turmoil in Ireland also had an unbearable quality in its delivery. That is, a verbose, hard-to-read, under-punctuated, quotation mark-absent, indentation-missing way of prose. If this is an implementation of form follows function in literature, do I find it effective? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s my cup of tea.
It didn’t give me chills.
I believe any notion has the potential of being delivered in a fresh way that gives chills and makes one go why didn’t I think of it that way before. The book didn’t achieve that for me. The baseline is reading actual accounts, a documentary of sorts, or a basic search on the web. Does this book add value beyond that? Not really. I don’t think Kyungha was that effective a choice as the narrator. The first half of the book did little in the delivery of the key notion. I deem economy a great virtue in writing. Could the same message have been delivered with less words, demanding less time? Also, if fictionality was employed, did it add value?
When is one allowed to swap books?
Do we get to swap books like we do a Netflix show, Youtube video, TikTok? I clearly wasn’t ready for this one. I wasn’t particularly interested in the historical event. I wasn’t seeking for it. But it was selected, as this month’s book for the book club. I had a vote too. So I share the responsibility of the choice, very much like the choosing of a Netflix movie. It’s also a recent Nobel laureate’s new release. It’s a long winded way of saying I didn’t enjoy it much. Also, I thought my time could be better spent elsewhere. But the rebalancing cadence matters. Optimization at every turn would yield nothing but an excess of unfinished attempts. The balance of deliberation in choice and sticking till the end seems to be important. I skimmed through the book. I guess it was a reasonable approach.
Written from scratch by Meston Ecoa.
