Living or Dead?

I haven’t been able to read much these past couple of months. Poetry, yes—plenty of that—but no prose. I was desperate to read and yet couldn’t. Never in my life have I struggled to consume words like this.

After rapidly switching between books, (none of which could hold me)—books on craft, simple stories, purposeful stories—I finally picked up The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

If I had to describe my state while reading it, I would simply say: the book stupefied me. For days after finishing it, I lay limp, thinking about this world, what it means to me, and what I mean to it.

Wikipedia notes that Han Kang was deeply influenced by the quote of another noted Korean writer Yi Sang: I believe that humans should be plants.

An image that haunts me to this day is that of a bus chugging up a winding road toward the top of a mountain on a dark, rainy afternoon, a grey hound-ish structure looming at the summit. Ch’ukseong Psychiatric Hospital stands there, overlooking a valley of near-nothingness. The questions buried in the stares of its inmates seem to implore the world with an urgency to look up and meet those eyes.

That image has become a painting in my mind, imprinted.

Across the book’s three parts, she explores some fundamental questions of our conscious lives. Some of these questions have troubled me for way long and this was the first time I met another fellow human trying to attempt processing it through words. That itself was so humbling.

Her Nobel Acceptance Speech goes deeper into these inquiries: <please give it a read – it is beautiful by itself>

Can a person ever be completely innocent?

To what depths can we reject violence?

What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human?

I struggled to reconcile with myself after reading it. As I turned its pages and stared outside, I realized how often I have absorbed violence—through my body, through my mind—without even noticing. The book threw me into a centrifuge, separating parts of me I didn’t know were tangled.

I couldn’t fathom how far the book had travelled into my bloodstream. It doesn’t fit into any genre. It is a book of being—or not being.

It took me over two weeks to be ready to read again. Meanwhile, I lived on poetry — my panacea these days.

Then, suddenly, I knew what I wanted. I picked up Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow.

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at 16, James in 2024, at 19. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

This book deals with grief in a manner that feels real, no that is not correct, the true statement will be — this book deals with grief in a manner that is real.

This is the first time I see someone refusing to use the word grief. Because she knows as soon as she says grief she is time limiting it, as if a morning will come when she would have recovered from it.

She accepts her living in the abyss is permanent now, but she also declares that if life is stubborn, so is she. She will live in her own abyss in her own terms.

I have held the book to my bosom and cried incessantly only to realize I was mourning for something that was dead inside me. I couldn't, cannot name it yet, even probably point a finger to what I am grieving for, but probably a version of me that doesn't exist any longer. Time and again life has tried for me to say goodbye to that self, but it has been miserably unsuccessful till now. I realized the peeling of my layers that I have been doing in the last couple of years has also led me to finally set aside the dead cells. And yet I don't know what the new self is, how I treat this self, where do I go with it or how do I attend to it.

The book towards the end goes deeper into her own growing up and mental and physical abuse she had faced from her mother and what it did to her, how it shaped her and her evolution as a different parent — how that in turn shaped her children.

One particular incident tore me: a five-year-old Vincent comes home devastated because his best friend Mari told him she might not marry him because she wanted to marry her brother. Vincent was immobile for hours. Mari’s mother, like all other mothers, found this endearing while Yiyun, after finding it adorable, also found it alarming and wished that Vincent had not been born with the capacity to feel what he felt in life. This reminded me of a very personal incident and I concur with Yiyun. Yiyun had known Vincent would be let down by this world sooner or later. And for James she did not see it coming, well, not so vividly. So much for a mother's intuition.

I found this book at exactly the time I was meant to. I’m grateful for that.

Both the books are limited in pages: The Vegetarian is 182 pages long and Things in Nature Merely Grow is 172 pages short and yet I took pages and pages of notes from both these books for my soul.

Both put spotlight on life and death being parts illuminated vs. not. What it means to be human. I feel the black holes I’ve carried for years slowly turning away.

Only time — or death — will tell.

For now, and now, and now, I live.