Esther
2026년 9월 10일
The book of December is Yiyun Li's <Things in Nature Merely Grow>.
I first encountered Yuyun Li’s short stories through The New Yorker. Then I came across a podcast where she talked about her two sons, and how both of them had chosen death. I was walking along the stream near my flat then. I still remember the shock of it - the almost physical difficulty of taking in the words. For a few seconds, I stopped walking and just stood there. How can a mother survive that? I remember wondering. How does a person go on living after something that seems impossible to live through?
I feel one should tread lightly, quietly, around a thing like this. That both the passing curiosity and the probing kind ought to feel, somehow, like an indecency - an intrusion into another person’s private catastrophe. There are some things one should not ask just because one can.
And yet, life goes on. There is such a thing as time. One lives in it, whether one wants to or not. But then how, after that? What can anyone say to her? And what can she say? Maybe there is no answer to this, only the fact of continuing.
There seems to be a particular understanding of life that belongs to those who have lived so closely with death. Not necessarily some grand philosophical understanding, but something smaller and more practical, perhaps: a different relationship with the ordinary fact of being here. This is what I find myself thinking about more and more - not death exactly, but the peculiar discipline of continuing. Not just philosophically, but in the most everyday sense, I’m drawn to the idea of living forever-now: simply doing what is in front of me, even when doing it hardly seems like an act of choosing life. Not "you only live once", which has always seemed to me a rather frantic slogan, but something closer to a survival hack, a defense mechanism. You wake up. You make coffee. You go to work. You do the next thing. Perhaps there are moments when this is all that living is, and perhaps this is not such a small thing after all.
It is a genuine concern, whether we like it or not, because at some point in our lives we may have to encounter some version of this unthinkable thing. Admittedly, it is not a subject people generally want to think about, much less talk about. But I’m increasingly convinced that talking about death is not, in itself, morbid. Possibly the opposite. The longer you look at it, the more you begin to see what it isn’t. Which is to say, life. The strange, ordinary, continuing thing, even after we’ve stopped knowing what to do with it.
I can’t quite explain why, but I have a strong feeling that this book belongs to the end of the year. To the beginning of winter, when things start to look dead but are not quite dead yet. When everything seems suspended between disappearance and continuation. Anyone who is up for this quiet challenge - something we may have to approach carefully, tread softly, almost as if walking on fresh snow - is welcome to join us for our December meeting.
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“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged... My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen." There is no good way to say this - because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a time line.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: doing “things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is ‘to be.’ Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now.”
“이런 사실은 어떻게 말해도 좋게 들릴 수 없다. 남편과 나는 두 아이를 두었고, 그 둘을 모두 잃었다. 빈센트는 2017년, 열여섯 살에, 제임스는 2024년, 열아홉 살에 세상을 떠났다.” 이것을 좋게 말할 수 있는 방법은 없다. 말이라는 것은 결국 모든 것을 온전히 담아내지 못하기에. 죽음이 하나의 사실이 되는 데는 단 한순간이면 충분하다. “시간의 선 위에 찍힌 하나의 점”이 되는 것이다. 이제 그 하나의 점 위에서 살아가며, 작가는 제임스를 위한 자리를 담아낼 수 있는 말을 찾는다. 할 수 있는 일을 하면서 - 글을 쓰고, 정원을 가꾸고, 카뮈와 비트겐슈타인을 읽고, 피아노를 배우며, 죽음을 나란히 두고 - 생각하고, 사유하며 살아간다.
이 책은 제임스를 위한 책이지만, 슬픔이나 애도에 관한 책은 아니다. 작가는 이렇게 말한다. “죽지 않는 동사는 ‘존재하다’이다. 빈센트는 존재했고, 존재하며, 언제까지나 빈센트일 것이다. 제임스는 존재했고, 존재하며, 언제까지나 제임스일 것이다. 우리는 그들의 부모였고, 그들의 부모이며, 언제까지나 그들의 부모일 것이다. 지금과 그때, 지금과 나중이란 없다. 단지 지금, 지금, 그리고 지금. 지금이 있을 뿐이다.”
Sunday, December 27, 2026, at 5pm
Join us for an evening of camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. Admission is free, but attendance is restricted to individuals of college age and above. You can sign up for the meeting via Karrot (당근 모임) or secure your spot through Kakao (에스더어학원).
세종에 거주하고 있는 외국인을 포함해 교사, 강사, 회사원, 공무원 및 가사일을 하시는 분들에게도 원서독서를 장려하고 자유롭게 토론할 수 있는 문학적/문화적 소통과 교류의 공간이 되고자 합니다. 해당 책을 읽고, 영어로 소통이 가능한 대학생 이상의 성인에 한해 누구나 무료로 참석할 수 있습니다. 2026년 12월 모임의 책으로는 Yiyun Li의 <Thing in Nature Merely Grow>를 읽습니다.