The Odyssey

9. 오디세이

9. The Odyssey

By the summer of 2004, I had graduated college but was still unemployed. I hung around at home and at the library, continuing to take my TB medication. My steps had grown heavier, and I was too young to take control of my own situation.

Chung, a friend of mine, suggested meeting up. He was tall and soft-hearted, working an hourly job as a schoolteacher while preparing for the official teacher certification exam. I found him deep in some side streets, sitting in the corner of a students’ pub with a faded sign and mostly empty seats.

Underneath a yellow lightbulb, we wordlessly exchanged glasses. Later, with sour looks on our faces, we walked along the darkened streets of Seoul’s Myeongnyun-dong neighborhood, climbing up a hill from which the nearby Sungkyunkwan University Law School could be seen.

The school had once been located at the lowest spot in the area, but they’d built a new one that looked out over everything. Chung began talking to himself about how the law should “look downward” and serve the vulnerable members of society, his words trailing off.

Then he began to look through his shoulder bag for a book, which he handed to me. It was a biography of Kim Nam-ju, a poet who had taken up his pen to fight authority at the end of a gun barrel.

I asked Chung to leave a note on the blank first page with his name and the feelings growing through his mind as he gave me the book. I told him I would read it from front to back and then write my name and a note about my impressions before passing it on to someone else.

As a young boy many years earlier, I had put a handwritten note into a clear bottle, closed it up firmly, and thrown it into the river. My hope was that someone would miraculously pick it up and reply. Now that I was an adult, I sought to connect with the world in a slightly different way.

Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey was a collection of stories about Odysseus’s experiences while adrift in the Mediterranean. Now I wanted to set a book adrift in the world so that it could pass from hand to hand and link heart to heart, capturing a single larger story.

Twelve years have passed since then. I wonder how the book’s journey has been going. Who has it come to, and what stories has it left behind? Perhaps it is becoming worn down, covered in short notes and signatures, the tears and fingerprints of its readers, coffee stains, colorful underlines and scribbled observations, and creases on its binding.

Perhaps, like a boat stranded against a reef, it lies forgotten and collecting dust on someone’s bookshelf. Even then, even if it has been tossed into the trash as if torn apart in a storm, I would not feel sad. It simply means that it has fulfilled what it was meant to.

All of us whose hands a single book has passed though are passengers on the same boat, albeit at different times. Although we do not know each other, we have shared wisdom, shared a single rhythm, shared a piece of life. Just as individual waves combine into a single large swell, the moments and stories that emerge from that life are connected by books, and we exist as one within that.

Chung became a high school teacher and I have taken refuge in Won-Buddhism. I hope that over time, that book will return to me, as if by magic, and I can be reunited with the sadness of my youth. I would like to add one more note to its margins—“thank you.”