The White Book

by Han Kang

Physical pain always sharpens the awareness.

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.

I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.

Person who does not know who they are, where they are, what has just begun.

someone asked me whether I’d had “a particular experience, when you were young, which brought you close to sadness.”

So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.

Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.

What is white, though may yet be sullied; Only white things will I give.

Only a little time is needed now and the whiteness will leave those wings completely.

They will become something other, no longer wings, and the butterfly will be something that is no longer butterfly.

Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.

This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty.

“to pour salt in the wound.”

The expression “laughing whitely” (probably) exists only in her mother tongue. Laughter that is faint, cheerless, its cleanness easily shattered. And the face that forms it.

There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time.

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

She wondered what daily life would be like in such an extreme environment.

The only things that the mind cannot examine are memories of the future.

This life needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.

My life means yours is impossible.

Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to ...

I used to think of what it would be like if I’d had an older sister.

Don’t die. Live.

Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.