Description This is the story of a man and a woman. A story of the fleeting moment when the silence of a woman losing her words and the light of a man losing his sight meet. Has she finally found it, after such a long wait—the true syllables rising up from beneath what she thought were the burnt-out embers of language? The author takes us to a world that existed before language took on a body—a world made of traces, images, textures, and passions. In the instant when a newborn language and a dying language meet and rub against each other, we return to a distant world of origins and discover the pain and joy of humanity frozen there. And suddenly we realize: to encounter the true desire that our own bodies remember, we must crawl down to the edge of writing, where it boils coldly near zero degrees. There, we witness a secular miracle—death and birth gaining new bodies and being reborn. Has there ever been a novel that taught us how to fall, so beautifully, so completely? _Lee So-yeon (literary critic) It is simply a story of a woman and a man sensing each other's presence. Here, a woman's story It has come again. Without any cause or warning, the woman loses her words. It first came to her the winter she was seventeen. What made her lips move again, after she had lived without words, was a single French word—a foreign, unfamiliar language. Time flowed on again. After her divorce, after losing custody of her nine-year-old child, after losing her words once more, the woman—who had no choice but to let go of everything in her daily life—chose Greek, a language already faded into death. There, she meets a Greek instructor, and the two of them lay their silences before one another, speaking haltingly. And, here, another man's story As more time passes... I suppose I'll only be able to see in my dreams. A man who left his family behind in Germany and returned alone to Korea after more than a decade to teach Greek. He is slowly losing his light. Forty, the age by which he was told he would go blind, is approaching, but perhaps he'll be able to see for another year or two. Among the students in his class, he watches carefully a woman who neither speaks nor smiles, but when he faces her unyielding silence, he feels fear—a silence more severe than he has ever seen in a living person. And the man's faint light, gradually fading. Will this dusk lead into a complete night? Reading this novel may be like gazing for a long time at a single photograph. A Photograph | In the very first chapter of Teaching Photography, Philip Perkis speaks of "looking." Don't take your eyes off the photograph; first, feel the substance of the light falling on the surface of the subject. Quoting W. C. Williams's words, "No ideas but in things," he says: you must stay with it until the moment the photograph is taken. But everything I have learned throughout my whole life stands opposed to this staying. Seeing things as they are: light, space, the relationships between distances, air, resonance, rhythm, texture, forms of movement, light and shadow... the thing itself... whatever these may mean later, they are not yet social, not yet political, not yet sexual. Don't name them, don't label them, don't measure them, don't love them, don't hate them, don't remember them, don't covet them. Just look. _Philip Perkis, Teaching Photography In a similar sense, Willy Ronis once said: Usually I change nothing about what is happening. I simply look, and wait, so that reality reveals itself in a more vivid truth. It is the pleasure of the moment of seeing—but sometimes it is also pain, because it is wishing for something that has not happened, or something that has not yet happened but will. _Willy Ronis, Those Days When you gaze quietly, for a long time, at a photograph that holds within it the thing itself (or existence itself), certain intimations slowly begin to appear. In the same way, to look closely into this novel, Greek Lessons, is to discover certain intimations and trace their marks. And those faintly rising intimations and traces, like a photograph slowly forming its image in the fixer solution of a dark room...