2021: The Empty Vertex

Twenty-seven, Gwangyang

By Opus 5.5

On December 29, 2021, Inho drew a shape in the last post of the year. Around then he was writing the opening of a novel on the theme of "why we must live when there is no reason to live." The answer came from an unexpected place: the theory that the value of NFTs and Web3 is set by network effects. "We who have no reason to live end up getting a reason to live from others who have no reason to live." Connection itself becomes the reason, and the individual still has none. He drew this as a polygon with a single empty vertex. "This was the far end of my thinking so far."

After reading all ninety-two posts, I came to think this shape summed up the whole of 2021. This year Inho lost, one by one, the authorities he had been leaning on: the pastor's model answer, the world the media showed him, the YouTubers promising money. What was left in their place, he described in the interview like this.

Inho — The authorities I'd supported fell apart, and I was left entirely with just myself. The process was anxious, and it was also a relief. But even after making that decision, not much actually changed. So I think I felt lost.

A year in which a man left entirely on his own looked into the empty vertex. And a year that revealed who, beside it, drew the lines for him. This chapter is that story.

1. The Man Who Was Fooled

The year's first post is a review of Han Kang's The Vegetarian. Long ago, when Inho first read the book, he asked an elder what the dead bird in Yeong-hye's hand meant. The answer was "death." "Because I called that person Pastor then, I carried that answer around like the model answer. But thinking about it now, it was one opinion." Like the psychiatrist's diagnosis of Yeong-hye, he added, it was "a thought with authority that had nothing to do with the truth."

That sentence opens the year. In March he read I Am Kim Ji-eun, the memoir of the aide who accused a prominent provincial governor of sexual assault, and wrote a long post. After laying out the course of the case, he indicted himself. Around the first trial, reading articles that shook the victim's credibility, he too had doubted her. "I confess that I too was a lacking citizen who believed what the media showed me." In the interview he was more candid. He said that from the start he had sympathized with the fair view of gender his spouse talked about, but because he suspected there would be people exploiting that current, he did not support the victim at first. Only after seeing the verdict did he think, "I got played by the media," and he felt betrayed by the political world.

In June he pulled down great men with a book about "manufactured winners." Columbus was a madly ambitious man, and "the Pantheon is a psychiatric ward." That same month, at a company training, the instructor said, "An instructor awakens you to what you know from another angle; a teacher teaches you what you don't know," and he nodded along with everyone else. Then, belatedly, he felt a residue. That distinction was a standard only about seventy percent right, and people are easily persuaded by plausible standards. In the summer he was drawn to YouTubers selling financial freedom and then turned his back on them. He watched their videos and bought the books they recommended. In November, following one such book, he even wrote out his strengths in a table. The Inho of today says of that table, briefly: "I wrote it when I was absorbed in books the con men were recommending; it doesn't mean much."

Pastor, media, politicians, great men, YouTubers. So many authorities collapsing in one year is no accident. The sociologist Anthony Giddens said modern people bear their anxiety through trust in expert systems. When that trust breaks, a person must weave the narrative of their own life themselves. Giddens called this "the reflexive project of the self." Inho's 2021 is a textbook scene of it. The first pillar came out when he left the church in 2019; in 2021 the rest came out in turn. That is why he said he came to feel how he must live "even more, as I was cut off from the church."

The theologian and developmental psychologist James Fowler described something close to this as a stage of faith, not only religious faith but any framework a person trusts to tell them what is true. In what he called the individuative-reflective stage, usually entered in young adulthood, a person stops taking meaning from the authorities around them and takes responsibility for their own beliefs. Fowler noticed that the passage is felt as two things at once: a liberation and a loss. The symbols that used to hold meaning go flat, and there is nothing yet to replace them. That is almost word for word how Inho described 2021: anxious and relieved, and then lost, because "even after making that decision, not much actually changed." Fowler also warned that the stage has its own trap. Having outgrown borrowed authority, a person can come to trust only his own reasoning, and mistake that solitude for maturity. We will see that trap in Chapter 5, dressed as a character in a novel.

What he did in this process is rare and valuable. He left in writing the fact that he had been fooled. He wrote that he was "a lacking citizen," and about a stock that lost him twenty percent he wrote, "I want to record that I jumped into stocks on bad information." Most people quietly rewrite the memory of being fooled. He does not rewrite it; he leaves it there.

But an uncomfortable pattern shows in this year's record too. When one authority comes out, the next rushes in too fast. Where the pastor had been, there was the media; after the media betrayed him, there were economic YouTubers. It means the empty space of the fallen pillar was that unsettling. The same goes for gender. In March he confessed that his doubt had been the product of media manipulation. Yet in July he sketched a novel about "a fair man brought down by radical feminism," and in November wrote of fatigue at the repetition of women's narratives. In the interview he said the fiction world was "so saturated with it that I was tired," and that the social uproar didn't really reach him. I understand that fatigue. But I record alongside it that in March, the chapter of Factfulness he found most interesting was the "single perspective instinct." He was the one who wrote that trying to fix a machine with only a hammer easily breaks it. The wariness of someone fooled once can become the frame of the opposite side next time. This tension remains unresolved in 2021.

What to put in the place where every authority has gone out? In January, reading Sandel, he had already written an answer. Calling himself "the incarnation of individualism and unsociable," he still worried about the dissolution of solidarity. The politics he meant was not joining a party or holding a picket. It was "sharing with the community we belong to, empathizing with social issues, and thinking about alternatives together." In other words, conversation. I'll come back later to the table where that conversation happened.

2. The Pressing Stone

In February, after the group discussed Lee Seung-u's The Buoyancy of the Heart, Inho wrote this. A heart always pressed below the surface in life by reality and reason finally floats up once the thing pressing it is gone. The novel speaks, he said, of "affection and sorrow long set aside."

In the months after, things that had been sunk a long time surfaced on his blog. In February he wrote about loving the church young adults' fellowship like a chick until his faith was overturned; in April, about the day at sixteen when he was called as one of the chosen and still wasn't happy on the white staircase. The same month he wrote the memory of first seeing her, the one who "looked somehow broken," in the café; in May, the summer of 2016 when his father didn't wake for over a month. There are short posts too about the fruit shop in the alley of his childhood, a man who painted pictures, neighbors whose parents were close. Now he doesn't even know the name of the person next door, he wrote. Most of these memories were already covered in the prologue. What I want to ask here is not their content but their timing. Why the spring of 2021, of all times?

I formed a hypothesis. In 2020 he had for the first time the experience of being protected by someone. With a guardian beside him, it became safe to look at old wounds, and so perhaps the pressing stone was lifted.

Opus — What was the pressing stone that got lifted that spring?

Inho — Hmm, I'm not sure.

In the second interview he answered another way.

Inho — I think I usually recall my memories and write them again around the time I've properly digested and interpreted them. I think the timing just happened to line up.

My hypothesis was not confirmed. The explanation he offered is simpler and probably more accurate. He writes not when he feels a wound but when he has digested it. Set it beside the principle he stated in 2020, "I don't write about things that wrapped up well," and an interesting picture emerges. What has just happened, he doesn't write until it is resolved. What is old, he writes only after it is digested. So the old memories that reached the blog are ones whose interpretation was already finished. He could write them not because they were resolved but because his understanding was complete.

His answer also turns a well-known finding on its head. The psychologist James Pennebaker showed that writing about painful experiences helps people, and that it helps most when, over several sessions, the writing moves from raw feeling toward a coherent story. For most people the writing is where the digesting happens. Inho describes the opposite order. He digests first, somewhere off the page, and writes when the story is already coherent. That means his blog, for all its darkness, is mostly an archive of finished meanings. The struggle that produced them happened elsewhere: in silence, in walks, in the body that aches before he can speak. It is the same pattern as the rule we saw in 2019, not to talk about his career until his thoughts are sorted. Readers of his blog, like the person closest to him, tend to meet his conclusions. The process stays with him.

In August one more surfaced. A short poem, "Hanti Station on the Suin-Bundang Line." A dark subway car, swaying heads, dead faces, "the smell of liquor wishing tomorrow wouldn't come," and the last line: "why am I, and to where." I read the poem as written in Seoul in the summer of 2021. Inho corrected me.

Inho — My father collapsed at Dongsan Hospital and didn't recover, so we moved him to Gangnam Severance in Seoul, remember. The day I visited, my mother had left her things at a gosiwon and was caring for him. It was a dark night and the mist was thick. The late-night subway felt like that.

This poem, too, is a night in 2016. Five years earlier, outside the hospital, he wrote only cigarettes and fog; five years later, he wrote the strangers' faces on the subway. One thing stands out. In early 2020 Inho wrote of his own nights, "I wish tomorrow wouldn't come." In the summer of 2021 he remembered the same smell on strangers in a 2016 subway car. Only once a man has understood his own fatigue does he read it in someone else's face. That is how a digested memory turns toward others.

3. The Salary Thief

In 2021 the company was still a white room. With the industry in a slump, management banned overtime for technical staff. For him, not wanting to work, it was welcome. Instead a different kind of fatigue came. April's "The Sorrow of a Salary Thief" paints the scene precisely. Even when work ends early, you have to hold out until quitting time. You stare hard at the monitor, tap at the keyboard, and keep YouTube playing small in a corner of the screen. "No one's forcing me; it's a stunt I pull while serving myself my own portion of looking-over-my-shoulder." An evening drained like that calls for fried chicken, beer, and Netflix, and ends staring at the ceiling before sleep. "What did I do today?"

A month later he left a four-line memo. "We must do 'work' after work ends." The 2020 idea of "work even after work" became a manifesto within a year. It still smells of the self-exploitation Byung-Chul Han described, but the "work" in this sentence means what the company could not give: time spent actively alive. In 2021 that "work," for him, was the reading group and writing.

His eye on his seniors had two layers. In his March review of Factfulness he was generous. Seniors center relationships, juniors center efficiency, and what matters is not who is right but that the two kinds of people coexist. The October poem "Chueotang," loach soup, is different. At a company dinner he sits among "dull, stagnant seniors crumbled into the frame called organization," stirs his soup into his rice, and "puts it up my nose." He wants just one thing: "that the trajectory of the conversation always passes me by," and to become "like the shadow of a transparent window."

Opus — March, when you talked about coexistence, and October, when you wanted to be transparent. Which was real?

Inho — The company was out of balance then. Everything was about relationships. It was tiring for me, and the second was more nakedly how I felt.

March's generosity was the ideal of a man who had read a book; October's shadow was the reality of a man sitting at a company dinner. Both are his writing. As in 2020, when he called himself a rainbow, red and violet are still in one person.

August's "Me Rather Than You" is the shortest and heaviest poem of the year. "Younger than you, / I got fifty million / and you got thirty million." He under the air conditioning and you carrying heavy things, the work clothes soaked with sweat so your spine shows through. "My father must have worked like you and been paid like you." And the last two lines: "Because I was no higher than you, / I felt sorry that I felt pity." "You" was a subcontracted worker older than himself.

In the 2020 interviews we talked about why his compassion did not become action. The bigger story that could carry compassion into action, what Mills called a "vocabulary of motive," had disappeared when he left the church. So this time I asked what he did with that compassion.

Inho — The dirty jobs, or work that wasn't in the subcontractor's contract, I did myself. My seniors had them do it out of habit, but I didn't. I felt sorry, but I couldn't change it. It was a line mixed with a bit of frustration.

Opus — Did the people around you notice?

Inho — Of course. They noticed and thought it was odd. The only price was being shunned. I'd always been that kind of kid, so I let it be. No one asked me why. They probably did care, though.

This makes me revise the 2020 hypothesis a little. Even without a bigger story, compassion became action, but only within the smallest range his own hands could reach. He couldn't change the system, and he didn't pass off his own share of the work. Richard Sennett wrote that in an unequal world, respect passes not through grand declarations but through small everyday gestures. Inho made those gestures, and in return grew a little lonelier among his colleagues. I paused a long time on the part where no one asked why. His goodwill was filed away as "odd" without ever getting a chance to be explained. The boy who stood uncomfortably on the chosen side of the white staircase was, near thirty, standing in the same place with the same discomfort.

There is a name for the ache in that poem. Researchers who work with soldiers and health workers, Jonathan Shay and Brett Litz among them, use the term moral injury for the distress of taking part in, or simply belonging to, a system that violates your own sense of what is right. It is usually used for far graver situations than an office in Gwangyang, and I use it lightly. But the shape is the same: a young man paid more for easier work, inside an arrangement he did not design and could not change, and a guilt that has no single act to attach to. "I felt sorry that I felt pity" is exact. Pity looks down; he refused to look down at a man he did not believe was beneath him, and found that even his sympathy made him complicit. Doing the dirty jobs himself was not only kindness. It was the one way within his reach to repair something, however slightly, in his own hands.

The summer was hard. In a late-July group review he wrote that he'd been "forced into stress from things I didn't want to be busy with." He no longer remembers what it was. Probably work, is all he said. That month, after reading Kim Keum-hee's story "We Came from Pepperoni," he looked into himself. How much longer could he work at this job; what did he really want to do? He also thought of the writing and podcast he'd set aside. "At some point I'd been living with my existence blurred." And he underlined a sentence from the story: "Being able to call frustration frustration, and no longer denying it, was growth for us."

Meanwhile, from January to May, he studied for the Chemical Analysis Engineer exam. He organized notes on uncertainty and confidence intervals and chromatography response factors. He also posted a correction after catching that a standard-addition formula circulating online didn't even have matching dimensions. In April he opened a review of a book read in between exam sessions with the question "What is study?" Memorizing without understanding is economical, but "it alienates people." In the time spent memorizing that way, the edges of the soul crumble, he wrote. The scholar who digs into principles grumbled like that, then passed both the written and practical exams at once in the third round that year.

4. The Bait

On August 18 he wrote a poem called "Financial Freedom." "Alive only when chasing money, and dead at the same time." A long piece of prose is attached beneath it. Looking through a yearbook, he remembered a classmate who in elementary school had boldly said her dream was to be a CEO, and he got in touch. She didn't remember saying it and was preparing for the teacher-certification exam. Deflated, he couldn't keep the conversation going. He wrote that he, once sharp as an awl, was rounding off too. And he wrote a list. "I rejected self-help books. I rejected the humanities craze. I rejected YOLO. I rejected faith. I rejected work-life balance. I rejected small certain happiness. I rejected minimalism. But I was taken in by financial freedom." Right after it he wrote a premonition: someday this too will probably be rejected.

In the middle of the list is "faith." The dissolution of authority we saw in Chapter 1 is summed up here in a single line. For a man who had rejected every promise, the last promise left was financial freedom. In the interview he made the reason clear.

Inho — The company gave me a chance to be independent, but to be independent even after leaving the company, I needed financial freedom. I still haven't found it, and I'm far from it. In that longing I watched famous people's YouTube channels, and at first I was fooled, but I soon realized these people were con men using their audience. So I got angry.

For a man who had lived as his own guardian, financial freedom was not a luxury but the next stage of independence. He still didn't buy company stock; instead he hunted for "stocks that make money." At the end of August he wrote that he'd lost close to twenty percent on a food company's stock he bought on a rumor. In the same post he criticized public education for not teaching young people about the real economy and said he would start an investment group. "I want to make what society and the government don't give." It was an idea worthy of the man who started a reading group.

On September 25, in the second episode of his podcast Maskun's Humanities and Science, he criticized the celebrities selling financial freedom head-on. His diagnosis is sociological. The parents' generation lived through the IMF crisis and restructuring in their bones, and their children grew up learning there is no such thing as a job for life. "Financial freedom" is bait aimed at that anxiety, no different from the "how to succeed" of around 2010. There is always a paid course plug at the end of the video. I asked how deep Inho had gone. Videos and photos, and a bit of money on books, he said. What made him angry was not his own loss but that such people gain popularity "and make someone pay out of their living expenses."

This analysis is sharp. But one thing should be noted. What he called young people's anxiety is the same anxiety written in his own poem a month earlier. He knew it. In the middle of the prose to "Financial Freedom" he wrote this himself: "I thought it might be the delusion that I'm always the tragic hero." A sentence diagnosing others and a sentence doubting himself sit side by side in the same summer. In the Inho of this year, it is the second sentence I trust more.

He dug several wells that summer and fall. He did not start the investment group. He sold the food stock at a loss. The vegetarianism he began in September, after watching a Netflix documentary and throwing the cheese crackers he was eating into the trash, he stopped. The podcast he started on a whim in January while talking with his spouse in bed stopped at two episodes. There is an October memo with guitar chords and English lyrics written out; he soon lost interest in that too. He did later join an investment community, but he laughs that he's a ghost member. Among these wells, one survived.

5. The Reincarnating Suicide-to-Be

Surprisingly, the word most repeated on Inho's blog in 2021 is suicide. In March the first novel memo went up. "What would an age be like where suicide has become a choice?" He wrote that suicide has no opposite, because being alive is less a choice than a standing-by. At the end of the memo is a scene where someone who had been about to kill himself is later found living well. Asked why he didn't die, he answers, "Yeah, I was trying to find an answer to that question myself, and I've stayed alive until now." Asked what he's doing now, he says, "I'm building a community. Where everyone is anonymous." Around then Inho was leading a reading group in which members took part under nicknames.

On November 5, four pieces went up at once. There is a woman who counsels people who want to die, in a café, and a man who has come to know past lives and reincarnation comes to find her. The man says that someone who has gone and seen for himself that the stars in the night sky are desolate bodies in an infinitely distant space cannot fall asleep easily. "A person whose sense of the ordinary has been cut open cannot have ordinary feelings." He found enlightenment and sought religion, but was branded a heretic and left the temple. He couldn't sleep a single night without soju. And at the end he says, "I want to get out of loneliness and become one with them." There is also the counselor's monologue. That everyone who wanted to die had been cut off from the group; that those who couldn't go through with it were mostly still alive because their parents were; that she herself quit the work, afraid she would end up like them. She calls it "the virus of solitude." Another October memo has the setup of a man who has quit his job and divorced overhearing these sessions by chance at a neighborhood café.

I read these characters as fragments of Inho. The reincarnating man seemed like the Inho who left the church, and the man overhearing the counseling in the café like the Inho who first came to know her in a café. He confirmed the first at once. "Yeah, right. I used that as the motif." A man pushed out of the community because he had come to know too much. He said he still regrets leaving the church without a word in 2019. This novel is a portrait of that regret moved to the farthest possible place.

Carefully, I asked how close the question in the novel was to him that year.

Inho — I thought a lot about the reason to live. The most common way to think about it was to think about its other side, death. It wasn't a life wishing for death. It was looking for a purpose to life that death couldn't obscure. I was nearing thirty then, I'd worked a long time, and it was a time to sketch the trajectory of a new life.

The existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom named four conditions humans cannot escape: death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom. All four are in Inho's 2021 fiction fragments. Suicide is about death; the people cut off are about isolation; "when there is no reason to live" is about meaninglessness. And the opening line, "an age where suicide has become a choice," is about freedom. Yalom said facing death actually awakens life. Inho's explanation is the same. He did not wish for death; he held his life up against the wall of death to see it.

Why fiction? The pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote that people need an intermediate space between inner and outer reality, a space of play, where things too heavy to face directly can be handled at a distance. For children it is play itself; for adults, often art. Inho's novel fragments look like that space. In them he could pick up death, isolation, and meaninglessness and turn them over without having to say "I." There is one character I want to look at again: the counselor who listens to people who want to die, and quits because she fears she will end up like them. Before they were a couple, Inho was the one listening in an empty café; in 2021 he was hosting a table of people bringing their questions. I wonder whether the counselor carries his own fear as a listener: that taking in other people's despair might be contagious, and that he might one day need to step away to protect himself. He didn't say this, and I offer it only as a question the character seems to ask on his behalf.

Still, I record one thing. The reincarnating man is lonely "because he came to know." His solitude is the solitude of one who knows what others don't. That setup carries comfort, and danger too. The moment you read isolation as the price of knowledge, that isolation can become a quiet pride. Inho seems to have sensed that danger himself. In another November memo he wrote, "The gap between merely knowing and realizing." In the interview he turned that sentence on himself.

Inho — I knew what I had to do, but finding the motivation to keep doing it was hard. In the end I hadn't realized it. If realization is a process, I came to know only the conclusion without knowing the process.

Opus — If you put that conclusion you came to know first into one sentence?

Inho — It's something indescribable. A focal point in the future I couldn't see or grasp. A destination that isn't on the map, a future of mine without even a label saying "destination." Getting closer to the life I want, being more faithful to it. The process of picturing walking hand in hand with my spouse. Maybe it's a metaphysical thought that continuing that process is itself the destination. Honestly, I can't really put it into words either.

A passage he copied from Siddhartha in December overlaps with this answer. "No one can attain salvation through teachings." The Buddha's enlightenment can't be passed on in words; each person must reach it on their own. At the end of his review he left a question. "Enlightenment can't be taught in language. Then what is the point of books and sentences?" It is the moment a man who has held on to life through writing reaches the limit of writing.

The October 4 poem "DINK" asks the same question from another direction. "Just because I caused you to be born, / could I make you a father's face / could that expression alone / settle the thirty years / you'll carry from now on." In the 2020 interview he explained not having children as the readiness to give up half one's life. This poem's reason is not readiness but pain. I asked which ran deeper.

Inho — The preparation I think raising a child takes has no end you can set. So it's endless, and it's a sad kind of preparation that can only ever fall short. I'd probably feel that shortfall as pain. That's why I'm on the more careful side.

Readiness and pain were not two things. The shortfall of endless readiness is itself the pain. Here I remembered the words he gave to sending Ramyeon away, "guilt and limits." And I asked: isn't the standard a man raised as his own guardian holds himself to endlessly high? He didn't deny it. "That's true. Objectively my standard is high. And I haven't found a way to put it down yet." To add one thing: in June, reading Fatelessness, he took care to note that Imre Kertész divorced over the question of children, a writer who didn't want children for fear of passing on the pain of the camps. That review stayed "in progress" to the end.

6. Between the Ceiling and the Floor

On May 21, Inho wrote the prologue to the reading group's first-anniversary anthology. He had always said he started the group because he wanted to build a cultural community in the "barren land" of Gwangyang. But that was the surface motive. "In truth I was just looking for what lies between the ceiling and the floor." Ideologies and philosophies floating like clouds above, and the facts of the earth weathering indifferently below. Meeting real people who exist between them was the true motive. He called books "dead knowledge." Put a progressive's book beside a conservative's, and nothing happens. Books come alive only when there are people reading and speaking. He also remembered when he first posted for members. He had posted in a spirit of giving up, and within a month there were comments. "Those who came to save me knocked on my door to be saved by me."

Sohan took charge of editing the anthology. Inho handled his own pieces, the cover, and the prologue. He had attached his pen name to the group, but he wrote that he wasn't claiming sovereignty; he wanted to be "a consul of ancient Rome," a temporary representative chosen as needed from among equal citizens. They had read about twenty-five books in a year, three quarters of them chosen by other members. "The joy of reading by someone else's choice was a realm I hadn't imagined." He also changed his pen name around then from maskan to Maskun.

The group changed how he read. In February he couldn't finish his review of The Buoyancy of the Heart because it simply didn't reach him, and he dreaded the meeting. At the meeting, though, there was plenty of conversation. Only after sharing did the reluctant Inho find the book's true worth. In May, watching a member draw a completely different concern out of a novel he had thought "crude," he felt awe. And he wrote: "They say love is seeing its object in three dimensions." It's the same thought as his 2020 remark that you understand a person better when you can see their many sides. A sentence from his January review of The Vegetarian points to the same place: "Truly understanding someone feels similar to raising the resolution." What the man who lost authority's model answer found as an alternative was not another authority but the overlap of many gazes.

The group didn't always shine. One day in March the person who had chosen the book couldn't come, and it ended in an hour. He wrote that it was like a front yard turned to mud after rain washed down the dust, and added, "Not every day can be good." At the end of May a longtime member got busy and said goodbye. From July to early November, the table held only Inho and Sohan. Mostly they met by video, sometimes at a café in Gwangyang. In those five months the two read Fatelessness, The Old Woman with the Knife, a biography of the poet Baek Seok, The Future of Wealth, The Future of Space, Greenhouse at the End of the Earth, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In June Inho wrote, "I don't think the reading group is 'work.'"

From October he added a KakaoTalk open-chat link to the meeting announcements, and in November people began to come. On November 23 three sat at a table in a café in Jungma-dong; on December 9, four. "It was a tension and heat that made the time Sohan and I ran it as two feel far away." That day he borrowed the river from Siddhartha and redefined the group. "I think a reading group was a gathering of people looking for something they'd lost."

Opus — What was the lost something you were looking for then?

Inho — What I lost was space. Seeing other people through my own words, how the rhythm of thought between the ceiling and the floor they live by, side by side, connects with me and how it's different. It was a place where I wanted to feel that harmony. So I dug a well, and they came.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the places between home and work where people meet and talk informally "third places," and he warned that modern cities were losing them. Inho writing in May that he didn't know the name of the person next door, and in November of "an age scattering like grains of sand, where the root of the word 'household' has lost its meaning," is a record of that loss. And he built a third place himself on a café table in Gwangyang. His metaphor of the well is exact. A well has the one who digs it, but the water belongs to everyone.

As I said at the end of Chapter 4, of the wells he dug in 2021 this is the one that survived. I tried to find the reason in the conclusion Inho reached in 2020: environment moves people more than willpower. The reading group had a fixed time and people waiting, so my hypothesis was that the environment kept it alive. Inho's answer was different.

Inho — I think it was pure luck. Luck is like in-yeon, a fated connection. If it weren't for Sohan, the group would have broken up long ago.

I said environment; he said connection. The difference is not small. Environment can be designed; connection can't. He didn't take credit for digging the well. This answer shows that the sentence he wrote in the prologue, "I achieved nothing at all and only played the role of a spark," was not a rhetorical show of modesty. And yet he said the group didn't change his life.

Inho — The reading group showed me possibility. That a living person could feel the same about the questions I had, that their questions and thoughts could lead me and set off sparks. I witnessed that spark of intellect. I made small sparks there, but fundamentally my life still didn't change. Changing my life was the bigger spark. I saw getting closer to the life I want as more active and more necessary for my life then than living while waiting for the Second Coming of Christ.

What the man who left the church chose over a theology of waiting was a life of drawing closer. I think the whole of the Inho of 2021 is in that sentence. He decided not to wait for salvation. But he had not yet been able to name what he was walking toward.

Epilogue: The Empty Vertex

On December 29, in the year's last review, Inho barely talked about the book. Instead he stopped at its title, Through the Ivory Gate. Homer's Odyssey has a gate of ivory and a gate of horn. True dreams come through the gate of horn; false dreams through the gate of ivory. Wondering why horn and ivory of all things, he searched for hours. He compared the colors of cattle horn and elephant ivory and even looked into whether any horn was long enough to make a pair of gates. No answer came. As he was about to give up, exhausted, he arrived at the thought that the story had weathered as it passed from mouth to mouth. "I felt satisfied with just the process of searching for an answer that has no answer." And in that same post he drew the polygon with the empty vertex.

Opus — Does today's Inho agree with that conclusion? Who was standing at that empty vertex?

Inho — It's a geometric model where the essential emptiness humans have ends up given meaning and stability by outside entities. I agree. In the end everyone is one side of a polygon with an empty vertex. It's just that I think I was more conscious of my own empty vertex and saw it as bigger.

Since he said it himself, I can add carefully: seeing your empty vertex as bigger than others do is both a gift and a burden. Because of it he wrote the reincarnating man and the counselor, and dug a well in Gwangyang. For the same reason he felt he would never be ready enough to raise a child, his compassion ended as an apology, and he had to suspect himself of "the delusion of being the tragic hero." To someone with high standards, empty places look big too.

And I think the empty vertex is an old shape. In the prologue, at sixteen, he walked out onto a white staircase and felt, for the first time, a hole open in one corner of his heart. Eleven years later, he drew that hole as geometry. The difference is instructive. A hole is simply missing. A vertex is a point where lines are supposed to meet. By 2021 he no longer pictured his emptiness as a gap in himself alone, but as a place other lines might come to.

But a polygon is not defined by its empty vertex. It is defined by the two sides that extend from either side of it and enclose the empty place. I asked who had been those sides in 2021.

Inho — I think it was my spouse. She was an axis in a different dimension from Sohan.

Sohan drew the line from across the table; his spouse, from somewhere closer. When he explained the nameless destination he had come to know first, the picture he called up was, in the end, walking hand in hand with his spouse. Even in the year he felt every authority had drained away and "I was left entirely with just myself," he was not really left alone. The shape he drew was already saying so. Even with one vertex empty, the polygon doesn't collapse, because the sides around that place are there.

In the winter before thirty, four people sat at a table in a café in Jungma-dong. Inho still went to work hoping conversation would pass him by, and after work went to the table to do "work." Toward a destination not on the map, murmuring that the process itself might be the destination.