Hello Friends, 안녕하십니까 당신 여러분,
It's been long since we've wrote. It is my sincere hope that the effects of time has not rusted the joint of friendship that once held us together in a such a pivotal way. I trust that all is well with you, as you may trust that I am still in a healthful enough capacity to write this winsome letter addressed to you. In truth, I knew not how to articulate this letter. How can words wrap themselves around time as a suitable garment, both modest and wholesome? For the time we've spent apart in silence, as we became muted ghosts in each other's past, what words must I use to manifest that time? Do my words count a minute each, or do they substantiate the mighty hour? Can these sentences, as noble as they might be, eclipse the inevitable locomotion of minutes and hours? We've invented something of a proverb, though not very gnomic, to encapsulate this dreadful idea:
Hey, how are you?
I'm alright.
Good sir, in no aspect of the word, "alright," should I ever find myself so. All in good fortune, I'd say, for to be just alright would be the greatest incapacity I could imagine. So I shall not be alright, for I am against the very idea of being alright! What a silly thought! Watch it frolic about and collapse under its own weight! Do I mean to wrong myself in some manner, whichever byzantine way that I may or may not intend it to be the way in which it is ultimately unfurled? Do I stand in front of myself and yell, stop! When I am out with friends, passing drinks around in jubilant quantity, am I then to be that insensate troglodyte a few seats down, drinking alone, in the shadows of remorse, weighing the place down with anchors of sand?
To be alright, and just merely so, is not some commonly used indication of a salubrious condition; it expresses the lack thereof, if not entirely, to some significant amount---unknowing if one's own condition is positive or negative. The indecision implicated in the letters of that word, alright, and the weight it carries about it when used in the context of this present inquiry, represents, my good friend, a steady deterioration of human interconnectedness. It is the fear of sharing the truth of one's circumstances to the fellow person. At our disposal is a lingual system that has been ironed into near perfection over centuries of physiological engineering and semantic architecture, yet our creation is limited by our resistance of using it to its full capacity. Language has become too vast for us to use completely. We have become so disconnected from language that we do not know the roundness of its words or the precision of their utility. The girth of nouns, the depth of verbs, and the height of adjectives have become elusive, mercurial and such enigmatic totems that they have the effect of warding us with all the skill of scarecrows.
Allow me here, my friend, to express my undying fealty to language and my amity for words. If I am to be excavated decades from today, old and patina by the over brimming of age, let it be known that there lies a man who believed in words with more faith than the contention that he was extant.
Ach, I apologize. I meant to write to you a letter of simple correspondence, but it became some epistemological palaver. I am tired yet restive---quite nervous, actually...
You see, in two hours' time, I have an important interview with the United Nations. You know that I have always wanted to be an employee at that fine establishment. I have not been able to sleep an ounce of rest last night. I lay there, half dreaming and half in gentle rumination, proceeding from sleep and wakefulness effortlessly as if they had no distinction, thinking about the promise of the future and the memories of the past.
I suppose it is a misfortune that I must write to a friend when I am feeling nervous! Imagine the rambling letters that I have delivered each time I am in need to take an important turn in my life. I wish that instead of having penned this letter, we can meet and embrace like old friend should, and then talk about all the exuberance of life over the finest ales that we can afford. I suppose it is too early in the morning for that and we are too many lands apart.
Express my love to your loved ones. I shall write again soon.
LEE, Soo-hyun.
Deslinkitu, VIII.MMVIII
