It is among the best 3 of the books I read last year, yet I don't know why there is no organized record of it. Lee Oh-young's Last Lesson. p.28 Death is a tiger that has come out of its cage lunging at me. p.31 There is a saying that the last shall be first. My daughter lived so hard and passed away. In the end, a person dies before cancer. You cannot win. But I will write and speak until I die. If you do everything you want to do, isn't that beating cancer? p.40 A person's thoughts and a person's words are that person's face and fingerprint. You must muster the courage to raise a question. I earnestly urge you: do not pass every piece of knowledge that comes to you with a unanimous vote. p.42 Read like a cow grazing on grass. p.63 That is death. It turned all my knowledge, all my thoughts, into powder, erased everything. The cancer cells were the eraser of my body.
p.69 When you grow old, you cannot shed more than a single drop of tears. These contents too seem to be from one of Lee Oh-young's books.. I don't remember which book. p.18 The price of solitude was the birth of thought. The thaumazein the Greeks speak of. That wonder when intellectual curiosity is satisfied.
p.46 I simply had many things I was curious about. Even if everyone took something for granted, if I myself was not convinced, I would not let it pass, no matter how trivial. Going back and forth between the question mark and the exclamation mark is my life, and in between there was the living of each day. I cannot forgive a life that is the same as yesterday. That is not living. Repeating a customary life is not living.
p55 The emotion of solving the riddle you had held is called "thaumazein" in Greek. The moment curiosity is resolved, in other words the moment the question mark turns into an exclamation mark. That joy is beyond words. An exclamation bursts out of me without my realizing it.
"Because there was a question mark, an exclamation mark comes into being. Knowledge without thirst is torture." p.97 When you "speak" to "words," a "new word" that did not exist in the world comes out. "What is the source of the creativity that does not fade even in your 80s?" p.98 I have never seen him answer the same question with the same expression in the same way. This professor mobilizes his whole brain every moment, striving to find new expressions and new ideas. That is why, even though his answers unfold each time with a beginning, development, turn, and conclusion, their components always change. He does not follow the thoughts or the flow that come to mind, but, like a pioneer always cutting a new path within the brain, he creates a map of thought as if wringing out brain juice.
p.102 It must be the native language learned at age three. "Why is reviving our language such an important task?" "When the scab that forms over a wound falls off, tender new flesh emerges, right? Chinese characters and the many loanwords are like a scab covering the wound in the Korean heart. When that falls off, the touch of the new flesh that comes out and the meaning like sensitive nerve fibers come alive. Not all Korean words are like that. .... Even a good word, used over and over, develops calluses. Everyday language is a language with calluses like the heel of a foot." Pungto (climate) → in the soil, in the wind..
p.105 I stood upon words and spoke to words. "Most people let words slip without much thought. Like skating, sliding over words. But I stop upon a word and speak to the word. That's the difference. People look at words in a glance-over fashion, but when there is an interesting word, I stop and look at it. Even pausing for just one second to think, a new meaning comes out and a new sound comes out." "Gatgil (shoulder of the road)," a standard word that almost became "nogyeon." Nogyeon → nobyeon → byeonno → gatgil / the process of a new language being born, changing the word order and turning Chinese-character words into native words to breathe life into them. p110. When driving on a highway, you cannot see the scenery before your eyes. Only when there is a breakdown do you pull over to the shoulder and stop. That is how various scenes and stories arise. Creation is not a well-running supercar but like a broken-down old jalopy. When others are running about frantically, you alone stop. And only then do you see. You feel. You think. "Gatgil" too was born through such a process of thought.
p. 158 A good idea is one you can state from getting on an elevator until getting off. In the end, many ideas come from the ancestors, and from the poverty they handed down. To become the most modern, you need the oldest garden. In a very long-aged garden, an astonishing flower blooms. In the long-aged garden the forebears made lies an old future.
p.171 You must neither insist only on our own nor be swayed only by the foreign. Globalism and localism must come together. So-called glocalism. Only when you embrace and combine the two extremes, rather than rejecting them, do creative ideas come out.
p.183 If you get trapped in the cage of "we," you cannot create something new. The point is not to be trapped in an echo chamber. "To know a nation's language is to enlarge the brain by that much." "A bird has a nest in order to fly far. The homeland, the people, is the warmest nest, but when not flying it is also a prison. To fly, we have a nest. And there we incubate eggs. The wings become a cover and an embracing thing. Wings are not only for flying. They exist to cover and to embrace. The chicks that hatch from the eggs will soon leave the nest and fly off to the far sky. And, as the mother bird did, they will build a nest on some branch. In this way, a bird that has come to possess both a nest and wings becomes happy."
p.187 The 3 don'ts and 3 dos: "Speak without a threshold, speak without showing off, speak without selfish motives."