[오늘의 한문장] 오, 윌리엄!

나의 첫 남편 윌리엄에 대해 몇 가지 말하고 싶다.

윌리엄은 최근에 몹시 슬픈 일을 몇 차례 겪었고—많은 사람이 그런 일을 겪었다—나는 그 이야기를 하고 싶은데, 그래야 한다고 거의 강박적으로 느끼기 때문이다. 그는 지금 일흔한 살이다.
두번째 남편 데이비드는 작년에 죽었는데, 그의 죽음을 슬퍼하는 과정에서 나는 윌리엄에 대해서도 슬픔을 느꼈다. 슬픔이란 정말로—오, 그건 정말로고독한 일이다. 그것이 슬픔이 무서운 이유라고, 나는 생각한다. 슬픔은 당신이 유리로 된 아주 높은 건물의 긴 외벽을 미끄러져 내려오는데 당신을 보는 사람이 아무도 없는 것과 같다.
하지만 내가 여기서 말하고 싶은 사람은 윌리엄이다.

-알라딘 eBook <오, 윌리엄!> (엘리자베스 스트라우트 지음, 정연희 옮김) 중에서 - P9

[오늘의 한문장] Eleven

When Mr. Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. Only two months after the original snails were carried up to the Knoppert study, some thirty glass tanks and bowls, all teeming with snails, lined the walls, rested on the desk and windowsills, and were beginning even to cover the floor. Mrs. Knoppert disapproved strongly, and would no longer enter the room. It smelled, she said, and besides she had once stepped on a snail by accident, a horrible sensation she would never forget. But the more his wife and friends deplored his unusual and vaguely repellent pastime, the more pleasure Mr. Knoppert seemed to find in it. - P1

˝I’m sorry,˝ she said, and pr...

"I’m sorry," she said, and prostrated herself before him. "My grandmother and mother spoke to me in Uchinaaguchi when I was a small girl." She remembered the stories that her mother had told her, about how when her mother was a schoolgirl in Okinawa the teacher would make her wear a batsu fuda around her neck, a placard that announced that she was a bad student for speaking Okinawan instead of Japanese. Her mother had come from a long line of yuta, women skilled in communicating with the spirits of the dead. The mainlanders had said that yuta and nuuru priestesses were primitive superstitions dangerous to national unity, practices that had to be stamped out so that Okinawans could be cleansed of their impure taint and become full members of the Japanese nation. Those who spoke Uchinaaguchi were traitors, spies. It was a forbidden language. - P33

She drifted closer to it. She would imbue herself into its fibers, its red, white, and blue threads. She would lie among its stars and embrace its stripes. The flag would be taken back to America, and she would go with it. "Nmarijima," she said to herself. "I’m going home." - P47

"In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell devised an ingenious engine," - P37

"That heat differential can be used to produce useful work," Takako said, "like a dam holding back water." Akiba nodded. "The demon has simply allowed the molecules to sort themselves based on information about their pre-existing qualities, but in that separation he has converted information into energy and bypassed the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We must build this engine." - P37

Takako imagined the uranium atoms, vaporized in some compound form. The molecules bounce about, like the air in her metal box. The molecules with the heavier uranium-238 will move, on average, just a bit slower than the molecules with the lighter uranium-235. She imagined the molecules bouncing inside a tube, and the spirits waiting near the top, opening a door to let the faster molecules through but closing it to keep the slow ones inside. - P39

연구자로서 거리를 두는 건 제 의무이자 습관이에요. ...

연구자로서 거리를 두는 건 제 의무이자 습관이에요. 현상을 관찰하고 연구하면서 엄정한 객관성을 유지하는 거죠.

-알라딘 eBook <은랑전> (켄 리우 지음, 장성주 옮김) 중에서 - P306

개개인에 맞춰 조정된 신경망을 구축하고 꾸준히 학습시켜특정한 사용자가 보기 싫어하는 콘텐츠를 걸러내는 게 훨씬 더 쉽죠.

-알라딘 eBook <은랑전> (켄 리우 지음, 장성주 옮김) 중에서 - P308

가상현실이라는 신흥 매체는 형태가 정해지지 않은 찰흙 같아서 잠재력과 가능성이 가득했고, 희망과 탐욕을 추진력으로 삼았으며, 모든 것을 약속하는 동시에 아무것도 보장하지 않았고, 아직 있지도 않은 문제를 찾아 헤매는 기술적 해법이었다. 서사성과 유희성, 어떤 종류의 쾌감이 궁극적으로 우세할지는 아직 알 수 없었다.

-알라딘 eBook <은랑전> (켄 리우 지음, 장성주 옮김) 중에서 - P336

There is a paradox at the hea...

There is a paradox at the heart of the art of fiction, at least as I’ve experienced it: while the medium of fiction is language, a technology whose primary purpose is communication, I can only write satisfying fiction by eschewing the communicative purpose. An explanation. As the author, I construct an artifact out of words, but the words are meaningless until they’re animated by the consciousness of the reader. The story is co-told by the author and the reader, and every story is incomplete until a reader comes along and interprets it. Each reader comes to the text with their own interpretive frameworks, assumptions about reality, background narratives concerning how the world is and ought to be. These are acquired through experience, through every individual’s unique history of encounters with irreducible reality. The plausibility of plot is judged against these battle-scars; the depth of characters is measured against these phenomenon-shadows; the truth vel non of each story is weighed with the fears and hopes residing in each heart. - P100

Yet, experience has shown that it is when I am least aiming to communicate that the result is most open to interpretation; that it is when I am least solicitous of the comfort of my readers that they are mostly likely to make the story their home. Only by focusing purely on the subjective do I have a chance at achieving the intersubjective. - P109

It is more like the absence of substance, a rip in the murky interior of the cabinet, a negative object that consumes darkness and turns it into light. - P339

The alien city was a perfect circle about ten kilometers in diameter. From the air, the buildings—cubes around the edge of the city, cones, pyramids, tetrahedra in the middle—were forbidding spikes. Ring-shaped streets divided the city into concentric sections. - P383

I remember being Reborn. It felt the way I imagine a fish feels as it’s being thrown back into the sea. - P49

I press the trigger in my hand. Lauren had given it to me before I left. A last gift from my old self, from me to me. I imagine my spine exploding into a million little pieces a moment before it does. I imagine all the pieces of me, atoms struggling to hold a pattern for a second, to be a coherent illusion. - P75

He felt feverish and delirious. He imagined the merciless rays cutting into him, the residual heat of a dead civilization. But he was not afraid or sad or angry. Even as they were dying, the people of Pi Baeo strove to save those who would come after them. He was doing the same now for his daughter. This was a story that would always mean something, a message worth passing on, even in a universe that was cold, dark, and dying. - P407

He discreetly wiped his eyes. It was the first time she had called him Dad. He looked at Maggie, and the feeling of being responsible for her was not heavy at all. It felt like a pair of wings. "Nothing. The wind." - P398

I had once thought the Singularity would solve all our problems. Turns out it’s just a simple hack for a complicated problem. We do not share the same histories; we do not all want the same things. I am not so different from my mother after all. - P374

Someone has plucked the strings that weave together the fabric of space, sending a sequence of pulses down every strand of Indra’s web, connecting the farthest exploding nova to the nearest dancing quark. - P378

I want to tell her that I understand her impulse to make one life grand, her need to dim the sun with her love, her striving to solve intractable problems, her faith in a technical solution even though she knew it was imperfect. I want to tell her that I know we’re flawed, but that doesn’t mean we’re not also wondrous. - P381