Snowflakes fall. Lightly, unable even to overcome the wind, they flutter here and there, descend softly in zigzags, and melt against my body heat. Those snowflakes gather one by one and fall as large flakes. They do not need to fall so thickly that I cannot see ahead. If one simply waits for time to pass in that state, snow piles up. At first, it seems to melt even on the ground, but the moment the amount falling becomes greater than the amount melting, the ground begins to be mottled white. Watching it, the process feels boringly slow, but if I look away for only a moment and return, a new space is already spreading wider beneath a white sky and white air. The snow, slow but unceasing over a long and tedious time, now covers the world it has once covered again and again, in layer after layer. Snow piled in that way gives people walking over it a crunching sound.
Individual letters have no value. Only when the things that appeared in the mind can be properly expressed through their arrangement do they become writing. Writing matters, not letters. Snowflakes are beautiful, but they melt quickly. In the same way, individual letters may be beautiful in themselves, but letters that have not become writing are only passing patterns in which no one has any interest.
When the sentences made by those letters gather and become writing, and that writing piles up, what sound will it make when one walks across it? When writing in a notebook accumulates enough to become worth reading, it has the sound of notebook paper turning. Because the letters were pressed down hard for a long time, the paper gains a distinctive structure from that pressure, and it makes a sound as it bends and folds. Not only when opening it, but also when turning the pages one by one, those sounds and tactile sensations become an external background, separate from the content of the writing. But what trace of accumulated time does writing saved on the internet have? Like countless other computer tasks, will it leave its memory as the click-click of a mouse? Will it become the feel of typing on a keyboard? Can one feel such things indirectly while reading?
After writing in notebooks, the next stage was writing in Word files. The method was exactly the same. Just continue from where I had left off, write the date, and keep writing. After a year passed that way, I printed it, bound it, and stored it. I made PDF files too, but they were only computer files for backup and search. When I reread, I take out the bundle of paper. So at first it is stiff paper, but after I read it several times, faint marks from page-turning remain on the front pages, and the lower right corner begins to curl upward from being turned repeatedly. Since I printed it on A4 paper, the feeling of turning pages is quite different from that of a notebook. It is the same paper, but because of the relatively large area, even turning just one page produces a rustling sound I would not have heard from a notebook. The sound of turning several pages at once - shrrr, tadadak - seems like a service that comes automatically with paper. So by the time a new year has passed and only a month has gone by, even though I have no special reason to look at last year’s records that often, last year’s record is characterized by its outward appearance: a flat rectangular block, with one or two front pages bearing a slight diagonal crease near the middle, and with the lower right corners from the beginning to the middle starting to curl up roundly. Without sound or touch, the bundle of paper itself, thrown on the desk, becomes the image. Like a notebook that keeps trying to peek out from inside its cover without being completely covered, it too is stored as a kind of fixed idea.
From the moment I write down one character after another to the moment I reread one sentence after another, notebooks and printed materials with physical form imprint their own images on me. I keep reading not only for the thoughts the writing calls up, but also to feel those things again. The fountain pen nib passing over paper with a rough yet soft motion, or the feeling of a keyboard that is heavy, as if stamping each character into place, can make me want to write. But they have nothing to do with reading. What keeps me reading is the texture of paper, the feeling of turning pages, and the auditory effects that come with them. That is why I expect to remain someone who prefers paper books to e-books. But thinking about it now, the pieces I write are automatically being saved online, and though each piece may look laughably small, like a snowflake rolling around, if they pile up like snow, then it is clear that reading them by looking at a list and clicking will be far better than printing them one by one. In that situation, it is only natural to wonder what external elements, apart from the writing itself, might make one want to keep reading online writing. I never imagined that when reading writing I had created in a word processor, I would feel the texture of a bundle of paper. In the same way, will online writing eventually be printed once a year after all? Or will reading it on a tablet give it a new sense different from reading it on a computer?
Technology renews the senses. But such things are often accidental. This is true on the level of technological development itself, and on a personal level too, unless infinite experience is possible, chance cannot help but enter. I look forward to what new sense the writing I have written will gift me when, between my experience and the technology of the world, it gathers like snowflakes and guides me again.
Korean original: 읽기의 감각