[오늘의 한문장] 대온실 수리 보고서

장과장 역시 뭐랄까, 일부러 갈등 상황을 만들어 자기 통제력을 확인해야 하는 사람 같았다. 살얼음처럼 냉랭하게 구는 태도도 자신을 위한 포즈처럼 느껴졌다. 하지만 공문의 문단 위치나 띄어쓰기, 공사장 안전모자 같은 규칙과 명령들이 만들어주는 영향력만큼 허망한 게 있을까. 그런 식의 만족감이란 겨울의 빈 새둥지처럼 허망하고 쓸쓸하지 않나. 사람들에게는, 진심을 주지 않음으로써 누군가를 결국 무력화하는 힘이 있는데 어떤 부류들은 그런 진실에는 무관심하곤 했다.

-알라딘 eBook <대온실 수리 보고서> (김금희) 중에서 - P107

If the plague comes to London...

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. - P55

‘I always keep my promises. I...

‘I always keep my promises. I am a man of my word.’
‘As well as a man of hands. Let me go, I tell you.’ - P36

He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic. It brings a slew of distant images to mind: fallen leaves, sodden grass, woodsmoke, his mother’s kitchen. ‘Anne,’ he says, biting into the apple’s flesh. - P37

Again, her hand finds his; her fingers grip the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He raises his brows and looks into her face. She has the expression of a woman reading a particularly hard piece of text, a woman trying to decipher something, to work something out. - P37

The woman leans towards him. She releases his hand, which again feels raw, peeled, ravaged. Without warning, she presses her mouth to his. He feels the twin plushness of her lips, the hard press of her teeth, the impossible smoothness of the skin of her face. Then she pulls back. - P38

Her brother, Bartholomew, with the wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars, rode on their mother’s front and the two of them could stare into each other’s faces as they went along, interlace their fingers over the round bones of their mother’s shoulders. - P44

The fleeces fell like storm clouds to the ground and out of each rose quite a different creature – thin, milk-skinned, gaunt. - P46

Then one day she came upon her father behind the pig-pen, his knee on the neck of a lamb, bringing down his knife. The smell, the sight, the colour took her back to a bed soaked red and a room of carnage, of violence, of appalling crimson. - P46

It feels to her as though the world has cracked open, like an egg. The sky above her could, at any moment, split and rain down fire and ash upon them all. At the edges of her sight seem to hover dark, nebulous shapes. - P47

Never say this to anyone else, she says to Agnes, in her creaking voice. Never. You’ll bring seven kinds of trouble down on your head, otherwise. - P48

Agnes must live with a sense of herself as second-tier, deficient in some way, unwanted. - P48

She grows up knowing that she must protect and defend Bartholomew from all of life’s blows, because no one else will. He is of her blood, wholly and completely, in a way that no one else is. She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must. - P48

It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it. - P49

She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be. There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognise it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won’t hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. - P49

Then he registers the long pl...

Then he registers the long plait, hanging over the shoulder, reaching past the waist, the jerkin laced tight around a form that curves suspiciously inwards around the middle. He sees the skirts, which had been bunched up, now hastily being dragged down around the stockings. He sees a pale, oval face under the cap, an arched brow, a full red mouth. - P30

Her voice is clear, modulated, articulate. It has an instant effect upon him: a quickening of his pulse, a heat in his chest. - P33

She does a strange thing: she puts her hand to his, where it is resting on her forearm. She takes hold of the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger and presses. - P34

You might find it a restless,...

You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it. - P25

They had, all six of them, from time to time, received the blows and grips and slaps that resulted from the father’s temper, but with nothing like the regularity and brutality of this eldest son. He didn’t know why but something about him had always drawn his father’s anger and frustration to him, like a horseshoe to a magnet. He carried within him, always, the sensation of his father’s calloused hand enclosing the soft skin of his upper arm, the inescapable grip that kept him there so his father could rain down blows with his other, stronger, hand. The shock of a slap landing, sudden and sharp, from above; the flensing sting of a wooden instrument on the back of the legs. How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones. The doused, drenched feeling of fury, of impotent humiliation, in the long minutes of a beating. - P28

He could push this man, this leviathan, this monster of his childhood, back against the wall with very little effort. He did so. - P29