Our Happy Time

I had never said the words out loud, but if someone had held a stethoscope to my heart back then, they probably would have heard: Why can’t the sun revolve around me? Why aren’t you there for me when I’m lonely? Why do good things keep happening to the people I hate? Why does the world keep angering me and refusing me even the tiniest sliver of happiness?

The only thing more evil than feeling nothing is not knowing that you feel nothing

I know finally how people can speak to and treat each other with respect, and love each other with trembling hearts.

I suddenly felt thankful that Jesus was executed as a criminal. Otherwise, who would have dared try to comfort Yunsu?

He blew off the rest of his fares for the day and invited her to his house. She went with him and met his wife and their one-year-old baby. The guy’s wife told her that he talked about how grateful he was to her every single day, and that he said he would never forget the kindness of the woman who had cried and pleaded for the police to let him go. He said it made a human being out of him.

Everyone is both happy and unhappy to some extent. But then again, maybe that wasn’t true, either. Maybe if everyone in the world could be divided into two groups, one group would be people who were somewhat unhappy, and the other would be people who were completely unhappy. And there would be no way of objectively distinguishing which was which. As Camus might have said, there were no happy people, just people who were richer or poorer in spirit when it came to happiness.

“Here’s the thing about people. We’re not born fully made. Colts and calves are fully made while in their mothers’ bellies, so they can already run by the time they come out. But humans are born and then made. It usually takes three years. Lately, there is even a theory that says it takes eighteen years. So, to put it in simple terms, God makes seventy percent of the person, and the parents fill in the remaining thirty percent—the rest has to be completed. But that thirty percent, it leads the other seventy percent. If we compare it to computers, that thirty percent is the operating system. But when the brains of people who were abused as children are scanned, five to ten percent of the brain is damaged. It’s as if, from the time they were children, they’ve been driving cars with damaged engines. They cannot control their impulses with that kind of damage. But it doesn’t affect the intelligent parts, their intellect. That’s why serial killers can have high IQs and be very logical. Ultimately, they are mentally ill people who have not yet been proven to be mentally ill.”“But not being able to control their impulses doesn’t mean they always hurt other people, right?” Aunt Monica asked.“Right. In these cases, the most typical symptom is insensitivity to others’ pain. In other words, their ability to empathize is noticeably diminished.”

Everyone is sad. Sadness is a wealth that you cannot give away. That is because you can give everything else to other people, but you cannot give yourself to others. Everyone is tragic. Tragedy is a scar that you alone carry forever. River of tears, river of sadness, river of wailing. Unlike wealth, sadness is shared among all people evenly.– Ven. Bak Samjung

The reason I hated my mother and the rest of our family was not that they fancied themselves to be cultured and artistic, wearing looks on their faces that said they weren’t all about money, camouflaging their own snobbishness in that all-too-typical way. I hated them because even though they all felt vulnerable and lonely as hell whenever they found themselves sitting alone at night, they had too many tools and opportunities at their disposal to help them disguise their own feelings and thus deprived themselves of the chance to face their own loneliness, their pitifulness, and their isolation. In short, they were missing out on the chance to face life head on.

So I, too, had come to the conclusion that since I did not own myself, it would be murder to kill myself. But then I slit my wrists in this room. Back then, I felt only one thing: knowledge could not ward off despair