A Little Life, 리틀 라이프

Hanya Yanagihara, 한야 야나기하라

몇 달 전 친구가 이 책이 인스타그램에서 유명하다고 알려줬다.

도서관에서 찾아봤더니 아니나 다를까 예약을 해야 했는데, 예약도서를 대출하라고 안내문자가 왔을 때 연체로 대출 불가 기간이어서 어쩔 수 없이 다시 예약을 했다.

봄에 읽기로 결심한 책을 가을이 되어서야 읽게 되었다.

너무 처절하고 고통스러워서 읽는 내내 마음이 힘들었지만, 그만큼 인생의 많은 부분들을 깊이 파고들어 포착해 낸 책이다.

자기 자신, 배우자, 친구, 부모와 자녀, 스승과 제자 등 거의 모든 인간관계에서 느끼는 감정과 수십 년에 걸친 관계의 변화.

직업, 성공과 실패, 기억, 삶의 의미와 가치, 행복과 슬픔, 그리고 무엇보다도 고통.

주드가 수십 년 동안 경험하는 자기혐오와 자해를 어느 정도 겪어 보았기 때문에, 경험해보지 않으면 절대 이해할 수 없는 종류의 일이라는 걸 알고 있다.

내가 정신과 의사가 되고 싶었던, 되고 싶은 가장 큰 이유가 그 경험인데, 그 고통을 수천만 배 이상 증폭시켜야 할 것 같은 주드의 기억을 보며 주드가 누군가를 사랑한다는 것, 계속해서 살아간다는 것 자체가 어마어마하게 존경스러웠다.

지금까지 읽은 21세기 미국 소설 중 가장 깊이 있는 책이었고, 인생 책 중 하나가 되었다. 

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     본문   

He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; he felt sometimes that he was seeing them for the first time, even after so many years of knowing them.

타인을 나와의 관계로 정의하지 않고 그 자체로 바라보려면 내가 모르는 그 사람의 삶을 상상해야 한다. 서로 마주 보고 있을 때 보이지 않는 뒷면과 옆면, 윗면과 밑면 말이다.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy?

There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

It was like any relationship, he felt - it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn't it wither?

어떤 관계를 유지하려면 상호적인 노력이 있어야 한다. 그래서 어린 시절의 친구 관계를 오래 유지하기 어려운 것 같다. 나이가 들어가면서 각자 걸어가는 길이 달라지고, 평소 어울리는 사람들이나 사는 곳도 멀어지니까 점점 더 많은 노력이 필요한데, 한쪽이라도 그런 노력을 할애할 의지나 여유가 없으면 자연스럽게 교류가 끊어진다.

But despite his friends' anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood.

내가 나이 드는 걸 좋아하는 이유이기도 하다. 

But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?

Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.

In those moments he wished, perversely, that he had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a period than to never have had her at all.

 Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.

주드의 자기혐오와 불신이 드러나는 부분. 그 마음이 너무 이해가 되어서 슬펐다.

"Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully."

Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandanges from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender.

극도의 고통이 너무나 처절하게 표현된 부분이다. 자해라는 건 경험해 본 적이 없으면 절대 이해할 수 없는 종류의 고통을 해결하기 위한 방법이다. 나는 짧은 기간이었지만 이러다가 죽거나 미치거나 둘 중 하나이겠다는 생각이 들 정도였는데, 주드가 평생 자해를 멈추지 못하는 걸 보면 그 고통을 얼마나 증폭시켜야 할지 상상이 되지 않아서 눈물이 났다.

Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

기쁨보다도 슬픔을 나눌 수 있는 사람이 서로에게 가장 소중한 관계일 것이다.

But it wasn't for him to judge whether the artists were good or not - other people, plenty of other people, did that already.

Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing - success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.

석차가 유일한 성공의 척도였던 고등학교 시절에 느꼈던 감정이다. 지금은 성공의 척도가 너무나 다양하고 내가 선택하기 나름이라 이런 무료함이나 절박함은 없지만 오히려 더 혼란스러운 것 같기도 하다.

He envied this in them, this ability they had to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them.

나이가 들어도 건조해지지 않았으면 좋겠다. 낙엽이 굴러가는 것만 봐도 웃는다는 나이를 지나더라도 낙엽에 감동받으면 좋겠다. 

"And it we are being philosophical - which we today are - we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life."

수학 교수의 장례식에서 동료 교수가 읽은 추도사.

He has grown to enjoy this too, sometimes he is touched that someone is interested enough in him to order him around, to be disappointed by the decisions he makes, to have expectations for him, to assume the responsibility of ownership of him. 

주드가 양아버지 해럴드에 대해 하는 이야기.

Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him in want, never occurred to him he might have.

Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, or perpetual doubt.

On one side is everything he knows, the patterns of his existence as regular and banal as the steady plink of a dripping faucet, where he is alone but safe, and shielded from everything that could hurt him. On the other side are waves, tumult, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color.

Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself. Be brave for once.

I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your hame but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all - and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.

Knowing that he didn't have to keep going was a solace to him, somehow; it reminded him that he had options, it reminded him that even though his subconscious wouldn't obey his conscious, it didn't mean he wasn't still in control.

내 경험으로도 알고, <한낮의 우울>에도 나온 내용인데, 자살이라는 가능성이 오히려 안심하고 삶을 이어가게 해주기도 한다.

He was releasing them - he loved them most of all, and this was what you did for people you love: you gave them their freedom.

He would be hurt again and again - everyone was - but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.

이런 트라우마와 고통을 가진 사람이 어떻게 이런 생각을 할 수 있는 걸까. 내가 상상할 수 없는 수준의 용기이다.

Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.

배우자와의 관계에서 어려움과 가치를 정확하게 표현한 부분.

Life was scary; it was unknowable.

He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in others.

As you got older, you realized that really there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. 

"Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualites you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing."

Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people's relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. 

He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.

Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

"We're all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn't mean they weren't happy years, that it wasn't a happy life."

It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.

"There's not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don't get to a certain age and it stops."

어른이 되려면 독립적이어야 하고 혼자서 다 해낼 수 있어야 한다고 생각했는데 이 말을 보고 그게 아니라는 걸 깨달았다. 어른이라도 다른 사람들에게 도와달라고 해도 되고, 같이 있어달라고 해도 되고, 연약한 모습을 보여도 된다는 것. 

And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child's whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent's reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.

아이가 아이로 살아갈 수 있도록 해 주는 일이 얼마나 중요한지. 어린 시절의 학대가 얼마나 거대한, 얼마나 깊은 상처를 남기는지.

Because he deserved happiness. We aren't guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.