Fintan O'Toole, "We Don't Know Ourselves"에서

 

 

Fintan O'toole, "We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History

of Modern Ireland" (2021, First American Edition 2022)

 

뉴욕타임즈의 'The 10 Best Books of 2022' (소설, 비소설 각 5권씩)

중 내가 읽어보고 싶어 한 한 권이 이 책이었다. 기사가 나온 바로 그날

동네 도서관의 서가에 단 한 권 있던 이 책을 빌릴 수 있었다.

 

저자가 살아온 아일랜드의 역사를, 자신이 태어난 해인 1958년부터

2018년까지, 연도별로 장을 나뉘어 쓰고 있다. 막상, 여기저기

좀 읽어보다가 흥미를 잃는다. 가톨릭 주교들의 온당치 못한 행태들에

대한 이야기들도 포함해서 별로 새로울 게 없어서다.

 

아래 마지막 장에서 몇 구절 인용한다. 2018년 투표에서

아일랜드의 노인들이 25세 이하 젊은이들보다 더 'liberal'(어려운

처지의 사람들을 생각할 줄 안다는 의미에서)하다는 것을

보여줬고, 그래서 전체 투표 결과도 2/3 다수로 그 방향으로

나왔다는 것을 읽으면서, 자연히 나는 우리나라를 떠올렸다.

 

 

Chapter 43  2018-: Negative Capability에서

 

"On 26 May 2018, I was sitting in a pub across the road from Dublin

Castle... We had both been in the castle for the official declaration

of the results of a referendum to remove the ban on abortion that

had been placed in the Constitution in 1983. The result was

stunning: the Eighth Amendment was repealed by the same

majority -- two to one -- that had passed it thirty-five years earlier.

The choice to repeal was endorsed, moreover in almost every part

of Ireland -- there was no great difference between cities and the

country, no epic cleavage anymore between the new and the old,

the traditional and the modern." (p. 560)

 

"The really startling fact was not that the young had voted for change.

It was that, in absolute terms, a greater number of people aged

sixty-five and over had voted to repeal the anti-abortion amendment

than those aged twenty-five and under." (p. 562)

 

"For that older generation, this was not really a change of minds. It

was an acceptance that it was  always in two minds. One of them

craved certainty, fixity, the ability to declare an imaginary future that

would confirm to an imaginary past. The other knew that  the real

lived history of the place and the people who inhabit it was one of

being utterly unfixed, of dealing with radical uncertainty through

evasions, silences and fictions. It was time to allow that second,

submerged consciousness to come up for air." (p. 563)

 

"What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was

born [in1958], is this: to accept the unknown without being so

terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrication of

absolute conviction." (p. 568)

 

"Over sixty years of change, and through periods of despair,

delusion and derangement, we have arrived at what the poet

John Keats called negative capability: 'capable of being in

uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching

after fictional certitude. Keats suggested that there is a

problem with 'being incapable of remaining with

'half-knowledge,' Maybe Ireland has reached the point of

accepting that half-knowledge -- the ability to see clearly

what is, while also acknowledging what remains dark -- is

better than the swinging between the pretence of knowing

everything and the denial of what you really do know." (p. 569)