seabound2

What he wrote in prose was inseparably interwoven with the inspiration which came from his journey. He made backpack travels alone beyond the horizon to cities. He did it, not for the journey's own sake, but for the purpose of writing. when he visited a city, with no relations with writing subjects, in spite of its traditional peculiarity or cultural attractions, the city could not captivated him. This was similar to the case of Monet's journey to Venice. During his stay in Venice, he was absorbed in researching out good place for his painting.  As an impressionist painter, he was indifferent to any place but the one for the subject matter.

There was a favorite book of his in his study which had been kept for 20 years by his side. He bought it during his first visit to London in 1990. It was laid on the roadside stand by an exit of the subway. It was 'Cafe Society , bohemian life from Swift to Bob Dylan' by Steve Bradshaw. which he translated into Korean and published the Korean version. For a year he was whole-heartedly absorbed in translation of it. He was happy looking back the days when he had wrestled with the book. Most of all he added a postscript written in Korean to its Korean version ,not as his impressions of the original book, but

a personal essay of his own, And he thought that it turned out to be a meaningful practice for his personal essay in style for the long process of his writing.

He loved the book, Cafe Society, a collection of literary essays on. artists and café life. There has remained in his memory a phrase he, below, in the book, with its exact meaning  for a while not easily understood.:

"The cabalistic spirit is the true destination. Plotting doubles his resources, enlarge his faculties. Compare the tone of a formal social gathering, its moral, stilted, languishing jargon, with the tone of these same people united in a cabal; they will appear transformed to you ; you will admire their terseess, their animation, the quick play of ideas, the alertness of action, of decision....."

He came to love it more after he met a passage below , quoted in the later part of the book, which an American lover of cafés in Paris wrote in her diary about the café there: 

Ever since I have come to New York, I realized even more the value and beauty of café life. The home and studio were private. No-one visited during the day. The day was preserved for work. Very often we did not even know where an artist lived or worked. But one was sure never to be lonely , for in the evening , after work, one could always walk into certain cafes and find friend gathered there.. There was an element of surprise.

One never who would be there , or who would come with a new friend, a visitor, or a disciple. If there were a party somewhere, one would hear about it at the café, and would go in a group. Or if a need of intimate talk was felt ,one left the group and walked to some small, unknown café. It was unplanned ,free, casual. It was not difficult to meet an artist one admired. one sat at the café with a group of friends. Sooner or later someone would introduce one to the other and the groups would mingle.

​

On reading Cafe Society, he whispered to himself:

I want to know how I can write.

Do you love words, sentences?

Yes, I love words,

I love ｅxpressions in sentences more than anything else.

I wish to write.

A word on the paper is much more significant than one hundred ideas in your mind. Let a word grow by itself on the paper.

you had better let your ideas be transformed into words and sentences  on the paper.

You can do it because you love sentences.

To write is to transform into words what is floating in you.

You had better catch on the paper

something personal about yourself.

Let others write other things social.

He was never on the road of his journey over the ocean to cities  without putting in his mind's pocket a piece of advice, below, of Reina Maria Rilke, which allured him in his high school days:

"In order to write a line of poem,

You have to meet

many cities,

many people,

many books.  

Above all, you can recollect the nights spent on the road of your journey which passed away in vanity with  myriads of stars

twinkling on the night sky."

He began to catch on the paper the two visions which  would linger in his mind's eye by sketching them on the paper one by one. The last line- 'to recollect the nights which passed away in vanity'- of the advice by Rilke let him sketch the two landscape in his memory, muttered to himself, Oh, the innumerable nights that he spent with no hope of recovery inside of the corridor of the sanatorium in his 20s! he hoped to catch the landscape of the nights by sketching it on the paper