Greek Lessons

by Han Kang

It’s a common belief that blind or partially sighted people will pick up on sounds first and foremost, but that isn’t the case with me. The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

“The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming,” I muttered. Yet blood runs and tears gush forth.

To be honest, there are times when I feel envious watching the students. Of their certainty, their unwavering firmness, perhaps—something only those whose life, language and culture have never been broken in two, as they have for us, are able to possess.

In a way, you believed that you had the right to speak to me in this manner. That you’d experienced enough suffering yourself to talk unreservedly about whatever misfortunes the world had to offer.

“You know how they say that, to the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t goodness or nobility, but the ability to do a certain thing in the very best way—arete was their word, the capacity for excellence. Well, think about it. Who would be best able to think about life? Someone who faces death at every turn, someone who, for that reason, is inevitably thinking of death, always, necessarily, urgently…and wouldn’t that effectively mean someone like me possesses the finest arete, at least for contemplation?”

He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue. He leaves long pauses between one sentence and the next. Similar to how someone writing in the dark tries to leave a wide margin between lines so the sentences written above and below won’t overlap.

If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.