늙어감에 대한 에세이

A Brief Eternity : The Philosophy of Longevity (Hardcover)
파스칼 브뤼크네르 / Polity / 2020년 11월

'잘 늙어가는 방법'에 대한 레시피라기보다는 '늙어감'에 대한 일반적 감상과 의미에 대한 책이라고 보는 것이 맞겠다. 난 사실 전자라는 생각을 하며 읽기 시작했다. 다 읽고 나서 느끼는 것은 늙어감에 대한 슬픔이다. 이건 아무리 어떤 철학적 의미를 붙여도 어쩔 수 없다.

어느 누구도 피할 수 없는 늙어감과 죽음에 대해 생각해 본다면, 나에게 주어진 삶에 대해서도 다시 한 번 생각해 볼 수 있는 계기가 되지 않을까 싶다. 예전에 이 책을 읽기 시작하며, 나이 50이 되지 않은 이들은 이 책을 읽지 말기를 바란다고 썼는데, 다 읽고 난 지금은 생각이 좀 바뀌었다. 내게도 올 노년을 생각하며, 지금의 노년들을 이해하길 바란다면, 그리고 지금의 삶을 좀 더 충실히 살 계기를 마련하길 바란다면, 이 책을 읽어도 좋을 것 같다. 하지만 젊음이 괜히 젊음인가? 그렇게 삶에 신중하다면 아마 젊음이 아닐 것이고, 아마 누가 뭐래도 이 책을 읽지 않을 것이다.

행복한 노년에 대한 답은 이미 널리 알려져 있다. 날마다 감사하며, 사랑하는 사람과 친구에게 둘러싸여 사는 것, 호기심을 잃지 않고 세상을 계속 알아가려고 노력하는 것, 그리고 베푸는 것이다.

<A Brief Eternity> 밑줄 긋기

My death is a horrible formality; the death of the people I love is an ontological catastrophe. The gradual extinction of persons dear to us as we grow older depopulates the world and makes the survivor an anachronism in an empty universe. "Living a long time means surviving many persons," said Goethe. So all that we are allowed is a brief eternity. As long as we love, as long as we create, we remain immortal. We have to cherish life enough to accept that one day it will leave us and hand over its enjoyment to the following generations. (p. 190)

  If a childhood is by nature ungrateful, that is because it needs all its strength to construct itself; gratitude comes later, when we feel capable of being disinterested and making sacrifices. Life is simultaneously a gift and a debt: an absurd gift given us by Providence and a debt that we have to repay to those close to us. There comes a time when we have to return to our family, our friends, our parents, our homeland, the benefits they have lavished on us. We don't repay our life debts; we recognize them, and honor them by taking care of our descendants in turn. The day when the debt is extinguished is also the day when life is extinguished, when we can no longer give or return anything to others, and we become, through death, the prey of the living. (pp. 195-196)

...We remain free only by immersing ourselves among others -- brothers, friends, companions, parents -- always curious, never resigned. We will lose our corporal envelope, disappear in the flux, become ashes once again. So what? We have always been transitory, part of a whole that transcends us. Let us rejoice to have continued to live and still to be able to enjoy the bounties of this world.

  In the evening of life, however happy or painful it may be, we gauge the good fortune we've been given. We have been simultaneously hurt and fulfilled. Many of our prayers have not been heard; others, which we haven't formulated, have been granted a hundred times over. We have gone through nightmares and received treasures. Life has been cruel as well as heady and opulent.

  The only word we ought to utter every morning, in recognition of the gift we have been given, is: Thanks.

  We were owed nothing.

  Thanks for this mad grace. (p. 197)

<About Time> by Adam Frank 밑줄 긋기

[For Paleolithic people], the time of origins existed not in the past, as we imagine it now in cosmology,but in this ever-present"everywhen." For the hunter crouching low in the brush, waiting for the herd to pause, the time of creation and his experience now were never far apart. For the women filling baskets with wild grain, their actions and the primordial divine acts, which set the world in motion, were always closely paired.

  The daily time of Paleolithic people was set against a cosmos that was not "out there" but rather close by. It was a cosmos without birth or final death or linear time. It was a universe alive with animate and divine powers that were always present, reenergizing the world each day with the return of the sun, each month with the return of the moon to fullness and each season with shifts in light and warmth.

   But culture and its needs would change and the powers animating the universe would grow distant and more difficult to engage. Divine entities that were once proximate and personal slowly became remote and willfull. It is in this understanding that the sky was the first retreat of the divine. The development of more complex cultures led to myths of the sky as the first and distant domain of the divine. (p. 17)

우리가 세상을 이해하길 멈출 때?

When We Cease to Understand the World (Paperback) - 『우리가 세상을 이해하길 멈출 때』영문판
Labatut, Benjamin / New York Review of Books / 2021년 9월

저자는 현재 우리가 세상을 이해하길 멈췄고, 이해하지도 못하는 과학(양자역학)으로 세상을 망치고 있다고 생각하는 것처럼 보인다. 저자의 과학에 대한 태도와, 불가해해 보이는 과학적 사실들이 발견되는 모습을 기술하는 방식에 동의하지 않는다.

소설이라고 했는데, 처음 2개 장(프러시안 블루, 슈바르츠실트 특이점)은 논픽션 에세이처럼 읽힌다. 사실 이 2개 장이 가장 흥미롭고 몰입할 수 있었다. 이후의 하이젠베르크와 양자역학에 대한 부분에서 소설임이 명확해지는데, 잘 알려진 이야기를 작가의 상상력을 동원해서 굉장히 극화했다. 다른 리뷰어들이 지적하듯 굳이 소설화 하지 않아도 흥미진진한 얘기를 굳이 이렇게 할 필요가 있나 싶다. 환각과 환상적 요소를 도입하여 이론들의 불가해성을 강조하고자 한 것처럼 보이는데, 과학적 이론이 발견되는 과정을 왜곡하고 잘못된 인식을 줄 수 있다고 생각한다.

빠르고 재미있게 읽었지만, 양자역학에 대해서는 차라리 데이비드 린들리의 <불확정성>을 읽는 것이 더 좋겠다는 생각이 든다. 물리적 개념에 대한 라바투트의 설명에서 엄밀하지 못한 부분이 가끔 눈에 띈다.

... We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding. (p. 187)

위의 글을 보면 오히려 과학을 너무 과대평가하는 것처럼 읽히지 않나? 과학은 도구, 매구 유용한 도구일 뿐이다. 양자역학의 불가해성이 저자에게는 너무 인상 깊었던 모양이다.

<A Brief Eternity> 밑줄 긋기

... Is stubbornly persisting in being, encumbering the planet with one's presence for centuries, really necessary? One cannot help thinking of Odysseus' paradox: taken in by the nymph Calypso after a shipwreck on his way back to Ithaca, he is cared for, fed and loved for seven years by his hostess, whose lover he becomes. Then Calypso proposes to make him immortal. But Odysseus, weeping on the seashore, dreams of returning to his family. Calypso is tiring him out, forcing him to make love to her every night. Even if his Penelope is not as splendid as the goddess, he wants to go home, to see his native land and people again. The attraction of the familiar is stronger than the seductiveness of the unknown. (p. 161)

... It is the brevity of existence that is the true miracle, not the phantasmagorical construction of religions promising us beatitude -- that is, from our point of view, an endless dullness... If there is an eternity, it is here and now, where we live. (p. 162)