[One Sip of a Book] "There Must Be Someone Better. Just Keep Doing What You Do"

An Heeyeon 'House of Words'

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart, creating a connection with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

Poets are said to ‘live’ words. Accumulated temperature, bearing wall, tangjong, jannabi chair, senmang line, fleuret, farming, motang... Words that seem like they belong in the 8 o’clock news or the science and technology section of a newspaper, or in academic and professional content. Words that are rarely used and whose meanings don’t come to mind immediately?non-poetic, dry, technical, academic words?suddenly intrude into the poet’s daily life, opening a path to the ‘most literary’ kind of reflection. “All words resemble eggs and have the power to break themselves from within,” it paradoxically states.

This is how my reading always goes. Living with such thoughts several times a day, whether in books or life, the pages do not turn easily. When reading a novel, I should be reading the novel, but I linger on a single word or a single sentence, forgetting everything I just read. Still, today was a day that started from the word hope and reached the word antagonism, so can I call this productive dyslexia?

<18 pages>

I don’t know where that courage came from. Teacher, why am I so heavy like this? I want to do bright, cheerful, and cute things too. It was a sudden expression of longing for another voice, disguised as childishness. At that time, poetry was really painful and heavy. (...) Teacher K was firm. Someone else must be good at that. Keep doing what you were doing. <177~178 pages>

“What do you think is the disadvantage of studying literature?” One day, while eating with a poet friend, I suddenly asked. The friend scolded me, saying, “Are you talking about work at the dining table?” but soon put down the spoon and said, “What exactly do you mean by disadvantage? Is it annoyance, dislike, or awkwardness? People who study literature just can’t be like this. Not a single word passes by easily. Every moment is a hurdle.” <249~250 pages>

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.