Description The weight of birth, aging, illness, and death, borne with the lightness of idle days Diligent writing that captures the tears and laughter of an era "When an obituary appears on the phone, death arrives before your eyes like a delivered package." — "The Pleasure of Growing Old," p. 7 Novelist Kim Hoon returns with a new collection of essays, Idle Days. As is evident from the very first sentence printed clearly on the page, he is a "working writer of practical labor" who regards even death as part of an ordinary routine. Though he is now nearing eighty, he observes, thinks, and writes more diligently than ever. The traces of this long and faithful labor are fully imprinted in this book. "Let us die lightly, and send off the departed with cool composure. Even in a simple funeral, dignified mourning can be realized. Let the departed, those who send them off, and medicine itself all return to lightness. Looking at the ashes, one can understand everything. This lightness can bear the heaviness of life. In the end, it is light." — "The Lightness of Ashes," p. 54 After the preface "The Pleasure of Growing Old," in which he confesses the complicated feelings of love and resentment he has come to hold toward alcohol and cigarettes in his old age, Part 1, "Waiting for a Bird," opens with fourteen essays offering a glimpse into Kim Hoon's present life. Confessing that he has suffered greatly from cardiovascular illness, he speaks with self-deprecating humor about what it means to live day to day with a body "aching in every organ and joint," and ponders what final words he might leave behind before his body is reduced entirely to ash. The hardship of lying in a hospital bed, forced to watch urine collect in a bag, naturally leads him to reflect on the weariness of ordinary beings who must endure the heaviness of birth, aging, illness, and death through the mere lightness of idle days. Spending his later years sitting in the sun at Ilsan Lake Park, he dreams that his words might escape this weariness and touch the bare face of life. He is, as he puts it, "busy with idle days." This man who is "busy with idle days" turns his gaze, in Part 2, "Writing and Rice," once again to "the daily grind of earning a living, fighting, loving, hating, and bickering." Having long lamented "the tedium of earning a living," for him, writing that precisely captures the sorrow of making ends meet is a lifelong task. He seeks to strip away "words that grow rank like empty husks, or float like phantoms," using only the words that are necessary, so that language presses close to the very center of life. He boldly cuts away the weak parts of speech that widen the gap between the writer and the mother tongue, so that he may "charge straight at things, rather than circling around them." "On days when things that want to be written, things that seem worth telling others, bubble up inside me, I must grip the reins of my sentences all the more firmly. On such days, adjectives and adverbs creep in, characters' speech grows overexcited, and assertive sentence endings rush to overpower the writer. The days when the writing flows easily, when the page count grows and the fee increases, are the dangerous ones. On such days, after finishing the day's work and before heading out to the park, when I pick out the floating words from my writing and skim off the excess fat, I am afraid someone might see." — "Thinking on Adjectives and Adverbs," p. 143 The effort to use only the necessary words with precision is also revealed in his affection for humble objects that fully bear the texture of life. Looking into the "dark and cool" holes of Gaya pottery in a museum, he thinks of the sorrow of the Gaya potters who perished before Silla's iron weapons. On the other hand, looking at a chamber-pot scoop that returns as an extension of daily life, reborn from household trash, he feels a surge of vitality in this "once vividly living thing." These objects, which "place themselves in a low position," seem to speak in "gentle, unembellished" simple words — a passage that suggests the very direction toward which his prose aspires. "Since I am a person who values rice highly, I first looked at the relics related to eating, but there were simply too many to take in all at once. Mortars, millstones, jars, salted-fish jars, kimchi jars, soy sauce jars, wine jars, rice bowls, soup bowls, kettles, plates, trays, pots, earthenware pots, small bowls, soup cups — they seemed endless. These countless objects each bore their own distinct expression, yet the consistent texture running through all these expressions was the simplicity and practicality inherent in the things indispensable to human daily life." — "At the Museum...