Opening and closing a secondhand bookstore is, at its core, monotonous. It isn't a business that draws crowds the moment the store opens. Most of the time spent in the store is spent alone, and during that time one must keep to the hours of opening and closing, sitting quietly in place while fighting off the helplessness that creeps in. Sometimes it feels like rushing a three-year-old who has no sense of time yet. It's already nine—hurry and brush your teeth, you have to go to kindergarten. You say this, then look at the child's unbothered face, and all your urgency drains away. I have to do something. So much time has already passed—repeating this to myself changes nothing.
Sometimes, waiting calmly is what actually helps. Because there is room enough. The countless secondhand books piled up exist beside me, seemingly having nothing to do with me—until, on some day, in some unforeseeable way, they come to form a relationship with me. That kind of thing is nothing out of the ordinary here. As in a line from Kim Chun-su's ontological poem "Flower," there are countless things here that do not exist until I call their name. But that doesn't mean such discoveries happen by fate over the course of running this shop. More often than not, the discovery comes through connection—one book I've already encountered links to another and leads to something new.
Even now, dozens of secondhand books sit unsorted, piled on either side of my desk. And yet every single book displayed in this shop bears the same name: "secondhand." But in truth, the word "secondhand" is closer to an abstraction. Perhaps that's exactly why using it makes me feel more distant from the books themselves. Since every book is different, there isn't a single one that can truly be captured by the word "secondhand."
Korean poets of the 1990s called this kind of abstracted language a "prison of language." Standing before their own poems—poems that tried to capture something and fix it in words—they were endlessly frustrated. How miserable those once-vivid moments became the instant they turned into language; the more language they layered on to escape, the deeper into the mire they must have felt themselves sinking. Among them, the poet Yi Seung-hun (1942–2018) went so far as to write the critical commentary for his own poetry collection himself. Rather than leave the explaining of his poems to someone else, he turned language back on itself as a means of escaping the prison of language.
The poet knew better than anyone that this attempt, too, would once again be caught by language. And yet he pushed on to the end. As Kim Su-yeong put it, "literature is the endless pursuit of the impossible"—he did not stop simply because it was impossible. When I handle old books, I constantly recall that literary spirit. A secondhand book, after all, is an object that has already passed once through an era and its readers, and whatever trace or sensation I discover within it tends to be a private resonance nearly impossible to explain. So perhaps the very attitude of trying, in the end, to find individual meaning while knowing it "cannot be individualized" is the point where this work most resembles literature itself. Continuing to try, as Kim Su-yeong said, even while knowing it's impossible. Handling old books, I think, isn't simply buying and selling old objects—it's closer to an attempt to finally seize, within language and physical form, some fading, abstracted sensation.
Most of the books discovered that way have already left my side. I'm not a scholar of secondhand books but the operator of a secondhand bookstore, so the books that gave me the joy of discovery were sold before almost any others. Seeing something makes you want it, as the saying goes, and whenever that reluctance crept in, I thought of my late grandfather, who ran a nectarine orchard in his lifetime. Even though my grandfather ran a nectarine orchard, I hardly ever got to eat a good nectarine. When harvest season came in my childhood, the nectarines piled high on the tray my family shared were always the bruised, blemished, second-tier ones—because all the good ones were sold. In the end, I suppose I've come to resemble my grandfather's merchant instincts: keeping the best for yourself was never the point; selling it came first.