Human Acts

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.

After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

I'm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away. Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.

Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there.

Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?

It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanking, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming.

A soul doesn't have a body, so how can it be watching us?

But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come around again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you'd made then.

After you were lost to us, all our hours declined into evening. Evening are our streets and our houses. In this half-light that no longer darkens nor lightens, we eat, and walk, and sleep.

Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother's memory again.

The body that had caused me such shame was going to be devoured by the flames--that was no cause for regret. I wanted to pare myself down to a simpler existence, just as I had while I'd still been alive. I was determined not to be afraid of anything.

The flowers that bloom in spring, the willows, the raindrops and snowflakes became shrines. The mornings ushering in each day, the evenings that daily darken, became shrines.

Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I will fully destroy the warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.

I'd been mistaken when I'd thought of them as victims. They'd stayed behind precisely to avoid such a fate. When I think of those ten days in the life of that city, I think of the moment when a man who'd been lynched, almost killed, found the strength to open his eyes. The moment when, spitting out fragments of teeth along with a mouthful of blood, he held his failing eyes open with his fingers so he could look his attacker straight in the face. The moment when he appeared to remember that he has a face and a voice, to recollect his own dignity, which seemed the memory of a previous life.

I'm fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognized as me.

The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?” You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask.

You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.