Educated

Books 2020. 11. 11. 13:36

서사는 우울하지만 문장이 아름다워서 깊이 들여다보게 되는 책.

 

좋아하는 문장들

 -  I had been educated in the rhythems of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundemental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the velley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle - the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons - cirles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immoral pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain. [서문 중 ] 

- "Don't give them any more rope to hang me with than they already have"

- In a few minutes we would be there, and she would have two ives in her small, trembling hands. Until that moment, I'd never understood the risk she was taking. "People die in hospitals." she whispered, her fingers clenching the wheel, wraithlike. "Sometimes God calls them home, and there's nothing anyone can do. But if it happens to midwife -" She turned, speaking directly to me. " All it takes is one mistake, and you'll be visiting me in prison." 

- Men like to think they're saving some brain-dead women who's got herself into a scrape. All I had to do was step aside and let him play the hero. [p.21-22]  

산파 일을 하는 타라의 어머니가 아이를 받던 중 응급상황이 발생하게 되자 하는 말 ; 자격증이 없이 출산을 돕는 일이 평소에는 (모든이의 묵인하에) 별 탈이 없지만, 일이 발생하는 순간 범죄의 카테고리에 묶이게 되는 상황을 설명하는 데 생각할 거리를 던진다. 면허가 있든 없든 누구의 잘못이 아닌 죽음이 발생할 수 있는데, 이 때 면허가 없다는 것 만으로 범죄라고 할 수 있는가?  마지막 문장은 타라의 어머니가 산모와 아이를 응급실로 옮기는 중 과속으로 경찰에게 걸리고, 산파가 아닌척 해서 경찰의 에스코트를 받으며 병원까지 갔던 상황을 들려주는 장면.

The Apaches were at war but had no worriors, so perhaps she thought the ending too bleak to say aloud. Th workd "slaughter" came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. It's the word we used on the farm. We salughtered chickens, we didn't fight them. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the worriors' bravery. They died as heros, their wives as slaves.

As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky; its last rays the sandstone alter on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determinded years before - before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the worriors' leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the worriors, by the woen themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalesing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. [p.35]

Tyler's guilt was all consuming. He blamed himself for the accident, then kept on blaming himself for every decision that was made thereafter, every repercussion, every reverberation that clanged down through the years, He laid claim to that moment and all its consequences, as if time itself had commenced the instant our station wagon left the road, and there was no history, no context, no agency of any kind until he began it, at the age of seventeen, by falling asleep at the wheel. Even now, when Mother forgets any detail, however trivial, that look comes into his eyes - the one he had in the moments after the collision, when blood poured from his own mouth as he took in the scene, raking his eyes over what he imagined to be the work of his hands and his hands only. [P. 39]

Me, I never blamed anyone for the accident, least of all Tyler. It was just one of those things. A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into a adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life- the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock. [P.40]

 

 

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