The White Book

by Han Kang

Even the smallest task is left suspended as I concentrate on simply enduring the pain, sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones, grazing my fingertips. One deep breath drawn in and this new moment of life takes shape as distinctly as a bead of blood.

Each moment is a leap forward from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

Each wave becomes dazzlingly white at the moment of its shattering. Farther out, the tranquil body of water flashes like the scales of innumerable fish. The glittering of multitudes is there. The shifting, stirring, tossing of multitudes. Nothing is eternal.

She carried on walking, white flakes whirling thick and fast around her face and body. Unable to fathom what on earth it could be, this thing so cold, so hostile. This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty.

A single handkerchief drifted down, slowest of all, finally to the ground. Like a bird with its wings half furled. Like a soul tentatively sounding out a place it might alight.

It is not true that everything is colored by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.

Whenever, after trekking through deserts, forests, and fetid swamps, a group was able to discern a body of water glittering white in the distance, they would have felt lacerated by happiness. Which would have been life. Which would have been beauty.

The skeleton in the Roentgen ray, gray-white bones in a gunmetal sea.

And she frequently forgot, That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand. That it had shattered and is shattering still. Slipping stubbornly through fingers.

She is sitting at the desk, like someone who has never known suffering. Not like someone who has just been crying or is about to. Like someone who has never shattered. As though there has never been a time when the only comfort lay in the impossibility of forever.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper. Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.

When the last strip of cloth was swallowed by the flames, I thought of you. If you can come to us now, then do. Slip on those clothes that the fire has borne to you, like slipping on a pair of wings. Drink it like medicine or tea, our silence, dissolving into smoke in place of words.