BITTER HORROR AND SUFFERING—YET BY THIS POST IS REMEMBERED EVEN SNOW HAS A CONSCIENCE.
“I am the mother of sorrows, I am the ender of grief”
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
I looked at Seoul with the eyes of sorrow. Dong-ho, the name of a teenager brutally murdered in Gwangju during the darkest hour in its recent history, will stay in my memory. With the dwindling readers blessed with names in literature that transcend histories, this might be one of those names. Together with Saleem Sinai of Rushdie’s Midnight’s children, Oskar Matzerath in Grass’ The Tin Drum or Col. Aureliano Buendia of Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Dongho for me marches slowly to that esteemed level. These names have their invisible statues that are erected at the center of modern literature’s town center. They are built for hagiography’s sake, for restless people to stare at, eternally psychoanalyze about, drink for bacchanalian festivities or be associated with for what is enduring, fantastical, profound and…
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