Esther
2024년 10월 22일
a love letter to Earth
이 책을 보며 David Foster Wallace의 “This Is Water”가 생각난 것은
물이 뭔지를 모르는 물고기들 처럼, 가까이에 있는 것을 오히려 잘 보지 못하는 우리들이기에.
가끔은 우리가 “집”이라고 부르는 것에서 나가 보아야 그곳이 얼마나 좋은 곳인지를 알게 됩니다. 그 “집”이 어떤 형태이든 지구가 없이는 불가능하지만, Carl Sagan의 말마따나 광활한 우주의 어딘가에 찍혀있는 그 여린 푸른 점을 집이라고 부르기에는, 지도의 복잡한 선마냥 줄곧 여러 갈래로 갈라져 있는 우리의 심장이 그 완전한 의미를 소화하지는 못하는 것 같습니다.
하지만 직접 우주로 나가, 하루동안 16번 지구를 돌며 그것을 계속 보고 있게 된다면 우주적으로나 개인적으로 균형있는 관점같은 것이 생겨날까요.
Samantha Harvey는 경이롭다고 표현할 수 밖에 없는 우주에서의 지구의 존재, 그 안에 사는 인간들의 희망과 약함, 잔인함과 친절함, 우둔함과 오만함이 뒤엉킨 삶들을 멀찍히, 그렇지만 여전히 6명의 인간들의 관점으로 보여줍니다. 철학적으로, 거리(distance)와 관점(perspective)에 따른 인간의 인식의 양상을 시적으로 표현한 아름다운 글이라 할 수 있지만 결국 “집”으로 보내는 러브레터입니다.
중간에 벨라스케스(Diego Velázquez)의 Las Meninas 그림에 대한 부분. 익숙한 그림이지만 누가 누구를 보고 있고 누가 객체이고 주체인가의 복잡한 관계, 그런 와중 유일하게 자유한 듯, 잘생긴채 앉아있는 개에 대한 해석이 또 어떤 명특한 생각을 나중에라도 줄 듯 기억에 남습니다.
이 책은 토론을 위한 질문보다는 같이 앉아 여러 느낌표들을 만들고 있는 것이 더 적합할 수도 있다는 생각이 듭니다.
읽으며 줄친 곳이 너무 많지만, 그 중 조금만:
The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.
That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life. Obvious.
Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one. But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments - and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished.
When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere…
What kind of absurd miracle is this? All of this?
But what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it?
Radiance itself. What would it be to lose this?
What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force? […] what made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force?
a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless.
Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?
Not to understand its mystery, but to understand that it is mysterious.
Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity.
progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong).
you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary …
look at what’s possible given desire and belief and opportunity, and you have all of those if you want them, if they can do it you can do it, and by it I mean anything. Anything. Don’t squander a life so miraculously given…
That the ride of your life will pass in an eye blink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.
This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright.
a planet contoured and landscaped by want
The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is.
Who is looking at whom? […] Welcome to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.
And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free.
We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans every did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing. […] This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud.
To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.
Humankind is not this nation or that, it is all together, always together come what may.