Anne Carson 의 에세이 "Merry Christmas from Hegel"에서

 

Anne Carson, Float (2016)

Anne Carson 의 책에서 그녀의 짧은 에세이 "Merry Christmas from Hegel" 을

읽는다.

It was the year my brother died. I lived up north and had few

friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in

my armchair, reading something about Hegel.

그녀가 성탄절에 헤겔에 관한 글을 읽고 있었듯 이 금빛 가을날 나는 그녀의 글을

읽고 있다.

You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of

Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly,

but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with

popular criticism of his terrible prose and claiming that

conventional grammar, with its clumsy dichotomy of subject

and verb, was in conflict with what he called "speculation."

Speculation being the proper business of philosophy.

Speculation being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive

entirety. The function of a sentence like "Reason is Spirit"

was not to assert a fact (he said) but to lay Reason side

by side with Spirit and allow their meanings to tenderly

mingle in speculation. I was overjoyed by this notion of a

philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual

redefinition of one another but, at the same time, wretchedly

lonely with all my family dead and here it was Christmas day,

so I put on big boots and coat and went out to do some

snow standing. Not since childhood!

눈 쌓인 숲속을 걸으며 사색한 내용이 인용한 부분의 두 배가 조금 안 되는

나머지 부분이다. 마지막 문장은 "Merry Christmas from Hegel."

이를테면, "슬픔은 기쁨"이란 문장은 슬픔과 기쁨이 사색 속에서 서로의 뜻이

부드럽게 뒤섞이도록 곁에 같이 놔두는 거란다. 나도 이런 '철학적 여지의

개념'이 매우 기쁘다.

게으른 나는, 읽은 것으로 족하다 싶어 사색은 무의식에 맡기고, 저녁에 테니스

치러 가는 길에 좀 일찍 나가서 여기 한인 미술동호회의 올해 전시회에 들를

생각이나 한다.