Greek Lessons

by Han Kang

She liked the feeling when she pronounced it: ㅅ—ㅜ—ㅍ, s–u–p, the sensation of first pursing her lips, and then slowly, carefully releasing the air. And then of the lips closing. A word completed through silence.

one day your own real existence will become an impossible fallacy.

There are neither words nor color for her until the night is over. Everything is covered by the thick snow. A snow that is like time, time that fractured as it froze, settles ceaselessly over her stiff body. The child by her side isn’t there. Lying motionless at the bed’s chilly edge, she calls the dream into being, over and over again, to kiss her son’s warm eyelids.

“I’m wondering about the difference between the divine, τὸ δαιμόνιον, to daimonion, and the sacred, τὸ θεῖον, to theion. In the previous class you said that θεώρειν, theoria, also means ‘to look’; is the sacred, to theion, also related to the verb ‘to look’? And, in that case, are the gods perhaps beings that look, or the look itself?”