조예은 작가의 작고 예쁜 책의 재발견. 친구와 합정동서 점심을 먹고 당인리 발전소 인근의 동네서점(독립서점)에 들렀었다. 예쁘고 작은 책이 눈에 띄어 맘에 담았는데 결국은 사진 못했었다. 그런데 회사 근처 헌책방서 다시 만나다니. 운명인가?디스토피아적 미래 소설은 늘 우울하다. 무엇이 사실이고 무엇이 거짓인가? 보고 싶은 것만 보려하고 그 밖은 눈을 감는다. 오히려 더 볼 수 있는 눈의 존재는 꿰맴으로써 침묵을 강요받는다. 예전에 코로나19가 한창일때 읽었던 <눈 먼 자들의 도시>에선 보이지 않게 된 인간들의 군상을 소름끼치도록 적나라하게 비판적으로 보여준다. 그런데 조예은 작가는 비교적 담담하게 디스토피아적 마을을 그린다. 마치 너희들은 몰라도, 아니 알고 싶지 않아도 난 다 알지만 굳이 개입하지 않겠다는 듯이 말이다. 3인칭 전지적 작가적 시점이 두드러진다. 다른 그의 작품들도 그 결이 크게 다르지 않을 듯하다. 그래도 맘에 들 것이다. 우연한 만남이 또한 인연이 되듯이.
SANZI HAD BROKEN YET ANOTHER RULE, BUT she didn’t care. It was night, and she was alone and on the forbidden edge. To make matters worse, despite her mother’s numerous warnings, Sanzi crossed right over, leaving behind the safety of her swamp island home. Just a peek, she thought. That’s all she wanted, then she’d go back. Down the muddy hillside she slid to a single tall tree. She climbed it, hopping from one craggy branch to the next, higher and higher. - P1
"2 더하기 2는 무엇입니까?" 이 질문을 들으니 왠지 짜증이 난다. 피곤하다. 나는 다시 잠에 빠져든다. 몇 분이 지나자 다시 그 소리가 들린다. "2 더하기 2는 무엇입니까?" - <프로젝트 헤일메리>, 앤디 위어 - 밀리의 서재https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/0640a79532db4a78 - P11
안도의 한숨을 내쉰다. 잠깐, 방금 호흡을 통제했다. 나는 일부러 한 번 더 숨을 들이쉰다. 입 속이 쓰리다. 목구멍도 쓰리다. 하지만 이건 나의 쓰라림이다. 내게 통제력이 있다. - <프로젝트 헤일메리>, 앤디 위어 - 밀리의 서재https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/0640a79532db4a78 - P14
나는 커피를 홀짝이고 남은 토스트 조각을 입에 던져 넣은 다음, 종업원에게 계산서를 가져다 달라고 손짓했다. 매일 아침 식당에 가지 않고 집에서 밥을 먹었다면 돈을 아낄 수 있었을 것이다. 월급이 몇 푼 안 된다는 걸 생각하면 그 편이 나을지도 몰랐다. 하지만 나는 요리를 싫어하고, 달걀과 베이컨을 무척 좋아한다. - <프로젝트 헤일메리>, 앤디 위어 - 밀리의 서재https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/0640a79532db4a78 - P23
문제는, 중력에 영향을 주는 건 아무것도 없다는 사실이다. 중력은 증가시킬 수도, 감소시킬 수도 없다. 지구의 중력가속도는 9.8m/s2이다. 끝. 그런데 나는 그 이상의 중력을 경험하고 있다. 가능한 설명은 한 가지뿐이다. 내가 있는 곳은 지구가 아니다. - <프로젝트 헤일메리>, 앤디 위어 - 밀리의 서재https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/0640a79532db4a78 - P44
As the quotation from Brecht hints, our problems were created more by our own behavior than by our Japanese captors. - P36
Because internment-camp life seems to reveal more clearly than does ordinary experience the anatomy of man’s common social and moral problems and the bases of human communal existence, this book finally has been written. - P44
I‘m looking at a single frozen moment in time. In the paint-ing, time appears to have pooled instead of frozen, as if past and future are subsumed by the vital present, or as if there were a part of this young man exempt from time‘s pitiless arrow, and that is what Titian painted. - P20
I left the picture and went looking for Maureen in the Early Renaissance galleries. When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found. It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily by his mother, who hugged her son as she would if he were living-a scene that is called a Lamentation or Pietà. My mother has always beena good one to cry-at weddings, at the movies, but this was different.She cupped her face, and her shoulders shook, and when I met her eyes, I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain. Whenwe adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage "Life is suffering" A great painting can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark and direct and poignant forwords. - P33
Also by custom, I couldn‘t open a book at my desk, or take a head-clearing walk, but it was just expected that I‘d waste hours clicking around on the Internet, learning how to not read books. So into that muck I sank. And before long I became something I had never really been before: lazy. - P48
Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can‘t be domesticated by vision-what Emerson called the "flash and sparkle" of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidy-ing minds typically let us see. Usually, we are looking around for useful information and dampening or ignoring a riot of irrelevant stimuli that threatens to drown it out. Monet‘s picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters-the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters-and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment. - P60
Looking back, it makes me think of Pieter Bruegel‘s great painting The Harvesters. In that picture, a handful of peasants take their afternoon meal against the backdrop of a wide, deep landscape. There is a church in the mid-ground, a harbor behind, gold-green fields rolling back toward a distant horizon. Closer to the picture plane, men mow the grain with scythes and a woman bends low to bundle it. And at the nearest cornerof the foreground, these nine peasants-comical and sympathetic-have broken from their labor to sit and sup beneath a pear tree. - P87
I was operating as a kind of watchful ghost, whereas he was this obvious grown-up, full-blown. His natural warmth and candor were a threat to my self-imposed lonesomeness.But things change. - P99
It turns out I don‘t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever. In discovering the cadence with which I meet people, I feel as though I‘m discovering the kind of grow-up I‘ll be. Most of the big challenges I‘ll face in life are also little challenges I confront in daily interactions. Trying to be patient. Trying to be kind. Trying to enjoy others‘ peculiarities and make good use of my own. Trying to be generous or at least humane even when the situationis rote. - P102
We‘ve all had moments when we‘ve been treated like gum on the bottom of somebody‘s shoe. You can‘t work as a security guard without the occasional asshole reminding you, in so many words, that you‘re just a security guard. At our best, we don‘t recognize this as an insult. At our worst, we do sometimes feel as small and powerless as the bullies intend. But on these days, at least we can make them villains in the stories we tell at the bar. - P126
Strangely, I think I am grieving for the end of my acute grief. The loss that made a hole at the center of my life is less on my mind than sundry concerns that have filled the hole in. And I suppose that is right and natural, but it‘s hard to accept. - P142
Michelangelo originally carved a stout and muscular body of Christ, but then he just continued to carve, steadily emaciating the figure until it looked frail and shrinking and oddly like modern expressionistic sculpture. His Pietà of the 1490s was a virtuosic display. This was something more pained and private. - P161