Untold Night and Day

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“The poet woman took a small road to the rear of the empty lot, then trudged on without looking back. Gradually her footsteps grew swifter. She headed straight to the heart of the darkness, which lacked even a single point of light, and where not even the road beneath her feet could be seen. Like a blind owl, she walked as one with the darkness, undisturbed by it. The sight called up in Buha simultaneous awe and fear. The barking of dogs drew closer. It occurred to Buha that pursuing the poet woman any further might result in needless terror and agitation, for her or else for himself. That was not what Buha wanted. He did not want the poet woman to turn around, having sensed a human presence. He didn’t want her to see him. He didn’t want her to know him. And so he stood, rooted to the spot. The woman’s shadow was swiftly swallowed up into the abyss of darkness.”

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“If we can’t convince a single person, not anyone at all, and if no one has any interest in our graves, you say we can simply turn away and go alone into the wilderness. Without knowing where it is we’re going. We might have to spend our days with only the sheep and stars to gaze at. The stars die and are born again, and it must be the same for the sheep, mustn’t it? You’d say that the world is unchanging. But if we lived like that, and eventually lost even the sad consciousness of our own inability to convince, that would be incredibly lonely, Ayami.”

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“‘No, Cheol-sseok, Kim Cheol-sseok.’ ‘That can’t have been his real name, can it?’ ‘I asked that, and he said it was a pen name, something he’d made up.’ ‘Did he explain what it’s supposed to mean?’ ‘Apparently it’s the sound of earth being poured onto his coffin.’ (...) ‘He also said,’ the director’s voice continued, ‘that he’d never once managed to convince another person of anything. Whenever he spoke to anyone, their response amounted to nothing more than the world tossing a shovelful of earth onto his grave. Which meant that by this point in his life, he was buried deep, very deep; he laughed for a long time after he said that, bleating like a goat.’”