This is why literature and history were one body, not two different and separate concepts. From the fundamental perspective, the description of history is nothing but literature itself. The scope of literature covers almost everything. It cannot be confined within a single unique definition.
Standing in the corner of our history, I cannot reject imagination. It is sometimes very esthetic or is represented as an exclusive sentiment against reality. Perhaps literature is allegorical of the shape created by such sentiment. In this regard, I am occasionally drawn to Homer more than
Maha Kassapa. In an attempt to achieve the best form of literature through epics and lyrical echoes, I walked like one of the crabs on a tidal flat at the ebb tide.

My passion is non-Confucian or rather anti-Joseon Dynasty. In this respect, the face of Heo Gyun, author of the story of Hong Gil-dong, seems to overlap with mine. For the sake of the literature and life that I long for, the past is beautiful material but never stained by absolutism. The fallacy that Aristotle left, by saying that there is no ancestor for the living creature, pleases me.

I recognize the start of a myth but cannot claim any knowledge of the start of history or the ancestor system. I love the world of gods but I think an Absolute Being make humans too subordinate. The fact that Emerson was isolated when he insisted on the way god was created by humans makes me feel some sympathy with him.

I have nothing to do with the founder of a Buddhist sect or Confucian government officials. I do not need a teacher. I sometimes think of the solitary enlightenment attained by a pratyeka buddha. I am on the path of being a monk with no teacher.
I cannot help choosing to become an orphan moving away from the past surrounded by doctrines, revivalists, authority and mystery. In other words, I would like to destroy the apprenticeship that makes me subordinate to the past.

The literature of a new era is not one that has simply descended from the past but is one that is currently newly born rooted in the soil of the past. Truth held by a friend is much closer to the real truth than the truth held by a teacher. A poem just born out of nowhere, not a poem suppressed with the yoke of tradition, whispers with another poem just born. This literature, a chorus creatively maintaining the horizontal relationship is what I dream of.

I hope my literature will wander around and not stay in one place. The Nirvana that I dream of is a Nirvana without any permanency. It is a dream with no leftovers.

The present is a flash, a moment moving from the unlimited past to the indefinite future.
I sometimes see my former lives. In so many former lives of mine, I could not resist becoming a poet as in my present life. There were days that I was less tattered than I am today. There was someone weeping amidst the glow of the setting sun. Was it I? At midnight when snow falls silently unnoticed by anyone, he was enduring the reverberation of the heart not being able to fall asleep. Was it I?
It is midday. There is a man who has fallen on the ground and he has told so many lies. Somewhere in the corner under the sun, there is a motherless boy growing taller day by day. There is a woman with no homeland, her hair blowing in the wind.

The darkness of the mama bear who gave birth to a baby while sleeping in winter and the brightness of the old ascetic who was blinded by the light from the white snow of the Himalayas were all a game of pain.

I helped the stars shine far away as a wild animal, ameba or a ghost. The stars lessened my pain shining above in the sky.

My lives persisted in relation with so many things.

I wanted to become a poet. And I became a poet.
I cling to my name as a poet because I committed so many sins by wasting time in my present life and former ones. Being a poet is a punishment of life imprisonment rather than a choice that I made.
Both when I was 18 years old and now, poetry is my Polaris. When someone says that I was destined to be a poet, I long not to finish my life as a poet. In other words, I wish I could be a poem at the end of the poet. A poem. not a poet!

Ko Un