James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

 There is a particular vanity in believing one has struck a "balance" in life — as though existence were a ledger one might reasonably keep tidy, debits and credits settling neatly by December. Writing on Yang Gwi-ja's Mosun last week, I found myself circling the novel's analytical bones and never quite touching the marrow: Jin-jin, weighing her aunt's comfortable monotony against her mother's exhausting chaos, as if a life might be assembled from the better halves of two others.  I confess I did the same, once. I drew up my own private ledger — the disciplined years of research against the reckless ones of love — and convinced myself the sum would eventually balance. It never has. If anything, the years have only widened the columns.  Perhaps this is where the Korean sensibility outpaces the English one. We were raised to believe imbalance is a fault to be corrected — a matter for a firmer diary, a longer walk, a stricter Sunday. Jin-jin's world sugges...

  There is a particular kind of walking that has no destination, and I confess I did rather a lot of it once, in an Edinburgh winter I would rather not describe in any greater detail than this.  I have been rereading Choi In-ho's Winter Wanderer  this week — a novel that, like the Schubert song cycle it borrows its title from, refuses on principle to arrive anywhere. Min-woo walks through the snow with nowhere in particular to be, and for years I mistook this, in my own case, for simple weakness. It has taken the better part of thirty years to see it differently.  Walking nowhere, I now suspect, is a kind of discipline — perhaps the only one grief permits. One cannot fix an ending onto sorrow any more than onto a river. Yet we now dispose of disappointment briskly: an unkind message, deleted; a match, unmatched. Grief today is seldom allowed to wander — it is filed, closed, swiped past, on the theory that speed and healing are the same thing. I remain unconvinced. ...