I spend my days basking in the sun for a couple of hours in the afternoon.
The sun is the counterpart of my old age.
When I was young, I didn't know what it meant to be in the sun, and I couldn't look into the space between me and the sun.
The sunlight of the past cannot be brought back, and the sunlight of tomorrow cannot be pulled back, so I have no choice but to bask in the sunlight of the present. However, sunlight has neither passing nor approaching, so the sunlight always comes to where I am now.
Sunlight is the light of the new present and the sunlight of this very place.
Looking back, the years I worked so hard that my tongue fell off seem like a waste, but when I waste my time basking in the sun, my body and mind are filled with light and sunshine.
I'm busy wasting time.
--- p.43 From "Waste of Time"

Words are not stepping stones to cross the sea of ​​confession.
When there is a gap between the subject and the predicate, the sentence becomes shaky and falls apart along with the stepping stones.
The downfall is not regrettable, as the branches are supposed to go their own way.
Goodbye, horses.
--- p.39 From "The Last Years"

The brooding bird was silent and focused, full of itself.
The bird endured the darkness, rain, and cold all by itself.
The male diligently carried small prey and occasionally took turns with the female.
I thought about the action of temperature crossing between life and life, and the reverence of the Korean verb 'to embrace'.
Just as a bird hatches an egg and hatches its chicks, or as it brings life, flickering like a distant lantern, closer and gives it form, have I ever embraced words and objects, breathing in my body heat?
You and I have been living wrongly for a long time.
--- p.70 From “Bird 2 - The Bird Gone”

I don't know if the time in space where the stars move, the time in the pottery kiln that ripens the soil on the ground to reveal the primordial colors that had been dormant in the soil, the time in the womb of mammals that grow their bodies inside their bodies, the time of plants that bloom from seeds, and the time in the kimchi crock that ferments kimchi all have the same texture and function, but even if all of that time cannot be brought into the realm of human language, those various times are beautiful in their own way, across the cliff where words have ceased to exist.
--- pp.69-70 From "Time and the River"

A place where crowds gather in sub-zero weather, waving flags and jumping up and down at a dictator and a line of weapons is not a people's square.
The space where isolated individuals each establish their own closed and exclusive fences and develop and practice the logic of egoism within them is not the secret room that Lee Myeong-jun envisioned.
It may not be true that human existence and the political and social environment are divided into closed rooms and public squares, but there were no closed rooms or public squares in either the North or the South.
--- p.109 From “Hostile Languages”

The Korean particle 'e' forms the logical pillar of a sentence while maintaining a space of freedom within the sentence.
The single-syllable sound is low and small, making it difficult to hear, but it loosens the rigidity of logic and broadens the world of writing.
When we write in Korean, 'The fields are awakened by the rain,' 'The flowers fall in the wind,' and 'The old man's body dries in the spring sun,' '에' not only indicates causality, but also opens up a new world of language that integrates logic and emotion.
The particle 'e' is loose, loose, and free, and is a blessing in Korean.
--- p.141 From “Reading the Investigative ‘E’”

Looking into the hole of the Gaya pottery, I feel the hole in my heart clogged when I think about making a hole in this iron-clad reality where I am gasping for breath, tied to the short leash of inherited evil deeds and ideology.
It would be impossible to poke a hole in the iron wall of reality with the careless and light movements of a potter from Gaya.
Yet, the holes in Gaya tell us that the dim, intangible, and empty things inside the holes are not ultimately powerless in human history.
--- p.194 From "The Hole"

When we hear this cry from young Bang Jeong-hwan, we all realize how regressive Children's Day is these days.
Nowadays, no child gets inspiration about life and the future by watching 'The Rising Sun and the Setting Sun'.
The child is tied to a short leash made by an adult.
Children are just 'my babies'.
The day when every household shouts, “Oh my, my child!” is not the Children’s Day designed by the young Bang Jeong-hwan.
Children's Day today is 'My Child's Day'.
If everyone only embraces their own children, all the children in this country will become ‘other people’s children.’
--- p.256 From “Children, Look at the Rising and Setting Sun 2”

The world cannot be constructed using only the first person, whether in writing or in photographs.
The third person is barely revealed because 'I' steps back.
Humans are blessed by the presence of 'you' between the first and third person.
It's embarrassing to say that the action of the body and mind that attracts by changing the third person to the second person 'you' is 'love'.
The well-expressed third person maintains a distance as an object, but also approaches me as 'you'.
--- p.259 From “Park Kyung-ni, Shin Kyeong-rim, Baek Nak-cheong, and Kang Un-gu”

Digital technology has revolutionized civilization by transforming all information and data into symbols, but the foundation of life and language cannot be symbolized.
Mr. Hwang's business, which collapsed one after another, and the work tools he left behind are imprinted on the muscles of humanity as immortal memories.
Gyodongdo Daeryong Market is an analog market.
Market vendors are waiting for the new swallows to fly in.
Waiting and longing are both analog businesses, and swallows do not return to the digital space.
--- p.279 From “Analog is Eternal”

Speech that mixes opinions and facts is difficult to understand.
This is where the confusion in listening begins.
Perhaps the impulse to state facts as opinions and opinions as facts is a latent desire underlying human language consciousness.
This is the difficulty of speaking.
(…) The Chinese characters for groundless and useless nonsense are written as hwa譁.
The world is a place where the garbage of words boils like boiling water, and the name of that world is Hwase.
--- p.297 From “The Difficulty of Speaking, the Pain of Listening”

As I approached Darling Noona, an indescribably strange smell emanated from her body and the hem of her clothes, a smell unlike anything in this world. Above the stench of DDT and excrement, Darling Noona's scent rose like a clear melody.
The smell was intense, piercing, rushing into my senses, an ungraspable smell, the smell of something illusive that could not be pinned to the ground, the more illusive it was, the more intense it was, and it stirred my young soul in a violent dissonance with the smell of DDT and shit.
(…) Old age, when memories of all kinds of smells come back under a tree in bloom, struggles to grow old, but waits for all the babies in this world to be born.
I wait for babies to be born in this fine dust and give off the smell of milk vomit.
I have come too far back to write this last sentence.

--- pp.314-318 From "Spring in Lake Park 2"