'Greek Lessons' Can Keep You Sane

Before she won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, I'd never heard of South Korean writer Han Kang. Now I feel indebted to her.

Han Kang in Seoul after winning the 2016 Booker Prize via Hankyoreh/Yonhap

If you were certain you’d become totally blind at any moment, would you sit down and write a letter to the lost love of your youth? That’s what happens in Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, which has nothing—and everything—to do with America’s recent presidential election.

I picked up the novel from my library as soon as I heard that Ms. Kang had won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature.  It’s what I do most years to keep from landing in a months-long holds-queue.  Which, admittedly, is not as bad as waiting for retail’s next available agent to take my call “in the order which it was received.” But in the case of books, why wait when all you need to do is get to the library before the line even forms.

The Nobel prize for literature was announced on October 11th of this year, but I didn’t dig into Kang’s novel until election night because I needed to finish another book first. Mistake, you say? To the contrary. Because as it turned out, Greek Lessons became my Get Out of Jail Free Card.

This might sound crazy, but a long time ago when all anyone could talk about was Deep Throat and Watergate, I came across a line that’s stayed with me ever since. It’s this one:

“Sanity is the most important moral option of our time.”

I mention this because I opted for sanity on election night by reading Greek Lessons instead of gluing myself to the tube and going nuts over something I could not control. Why not find out what makes the 54-year-old Han Kang of South Korea worthy of the million-dollar Nobel prize, which I have yet to win?

If this were therapy, my shrink would be telling me what a breakthrough this is.  And I’d be putting on my shy cowboy look. The one that says, Aw shucks ma’am, ‘twaren’t nothin’.

Not my first all-nighter

But inside I’d be like, I guess this really is a breakthrough. After all, I’ve been pulling all-nighters once every four years since I was a kid, the way you do at a football game believing that failure to pay rapt attention every second would jinx the home team’s chance of winning.

I stayed up all night when Richard Nixon won the presidency the year I was first eligible to vote. I was studying comparative governments and constitutional law in college back then. That’s when voting machines still had mechanical levers. What a moment that was! My parents and grandparents weren’t allowed to vote until LBJ signed off on the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I felt like Dorothy in the Land of Oz—until I heard a white lady in the next line say, “Harold, who else did you tell me to vote for?”

Getting paid

A few years later, when I was still in my 20s, I even got paid to stay up all night. It was my job to show the math on live TV, my turn to make like Walter Cronkite and tell the people who was winning what and where and by how much.

And that’s the way it was for me even after I waved goodbye to TV news to take a road less traveled by. I waited all night for America to elect its first Black president in 2008. And I waited— in vain—for the first woman president in 2016. In 2020, I waited long enough to see Georgia, my home state, elect its first Jewish and African-American candidates to the U.S. Senate—and the first president to age out of a second chance in the Oval Office.

But this year was different

Georgia is a swing state. Both parties—and their many dark-money surrogates—hit us with the media equivalent of nerve gas. The barrage was relentless and deadening. Although I intended to do what I always do on election night, this year I had a change of heart about an hour into the breathtaking coverage on live TV.

Call it an epiphany or a breakthrough, but I had a Sierra Madre moment. I didn’t need no stinking newscast. I needed Greek Lessons. If I became curious about the election, I could always check Associated Press online.

An odd choice?

For someone seeking sanity that night, I suppose Greek Lessons was an odd choice. One of the two main characters is going blind. The other is a poet, who’s lost her child, her job, and the ability to speak. Oh yes, there’s also a deaf mute. Sheesh!

Nobody gets shot. No bombs explode. No cars crash and burn. Nobody gets raped or has their fingernails torn out. How was this book even published?

This is a time when literary agents swipe query letters from their phones with the rapidity of horny Tinder users. So you have to wonder—how was Ms. Kang able to sell this one? Imagine the elevator pitch:

"I want to write about the longing for connection amidst great loss set against the backdrop of a Greek language classroom in South Korea. May I have a $50,000 advance please?”

Yeah, right! Unless your name is Han Kang and you’ve already won the 2016 International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian and a handful of other coveted fiction awards.

Here’s why it works

First off, there’s the scintillating beauty of Kang’s writing. Even in translation, it’s simply scrumptious. The poetry in her prose, which the Nobel prize committee noted in bestowing this award, elevates the sad facts of the story to the level of the heart. Ah, the heart. Remember that 8- to 12-ounce pump in the middle of your chest?

The reader feels for the fictional people of Greek Lessons. Through them, we see what loss does to us. For the Greek teacher, it’s about making preparations for the inevitable loss of his sight. And recalling the world that existed for him before blindness closed in on him—especially the love he felt for the people in that world, whether they reciprocated or not. For the silent woman, the down-on-her-luck poet, it’s about the daily struggle to endure the multiple losses she has already sustained.

But is that enough? Well, it wouldn’t be if this story were not also about redemption and, more particularly, loss as a function of redemption. After all, if Adam and Eve don’t eat the apple, who needs Bethlehem?

When a precarious redemption comes to Kang’s characters at the end of the novel, it feels like Shakespeare’s description of mercy. Dropping “like a gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath.” For the novel’s characters and for the reader, it’s a redemption worth waiting for.

The writing on the wall

As I checked my phone for election updates from Associated Press, I realized that Kang’s novel had already put election night in perspective. In part, because much of this story occurs in a Greek language class. You cannot study that language, it seems, without considering its many-layered etymology, which goes all the way back to Ancient Greek philosophy.

David: The Death of Socrates (detail). Public Domain Wikimedia Commons

And just like that—here comes Plato, Socrates, and the Stoics to usher in the eternal verities, as the two main characters navigate personal loneliness and loss. What is beauty? What is truth? What does it mean to know yourself? Who are you anyway? And in particular, who are you if you can no longer see, speak, or tuck your child into bed at night?

Han Kang reminds us that for the Ancient Greeks, the verb for suffer was nearly identical to the word for learn. And the word for beautiful was the same word used for noble, and also for difficult because those concepts were not yet split apart for them. Think of it! To be beautiful is to be noble—and the path is difficult. You cannot buy any of them at Sephora. Not even at the flagship store in Paris.

So there I was, reading Greek Lessons and checking my phone every 20 minutes or so. When Texas turned reliably red fairly early in the evening, the writing was on the wall. I was going to be on the losing side this election. And I was.

By the end of election night

I had already begun to mourn the loss of the America I believed in. Spending time with Greek Lessons did not change that. But it did put me in a philosophical state of mind. I was reminded that Paris was once overrun by Nazis. And that the Vichy government of occupied France was loyal only to Hitler. I thought about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. And how Ancient Greece was eventually destroyed by Rome. All of them surrendering in the end to the hegemony of time.

I realized then that we may be living through just such a time. Another tipping point of history. Which somehow led me to Quincy Jones, whose music had brought so much joy into my life over the years. The talented composer and arranger died two days before the election at the age of 91. So with all these other associations floating through my mind, it was only natural to find myself listening to “Everything Must Change” from Quincy’s 1974 Body Heat LP.

In the beautiful, precarious conclusion of Greek Lessons, Han Kang reminded me that what matters are the so-called small moments, the individual acts that define who we are.

Regardless of what happens to the body politic in the days ahead, what matters most is what we do and say to each other in the personal spaces of daily life. The online world will undoubtedly say otherwise, daring us to get down, get dirty, and go ahead and bite the apple.

But why choose exile from sanity when we could just as easily do our best to make the world a better place—one human moment at a time. Because in the end, like those two lonely people in Greek Lessons, it’s about you and me, how we treat each other, and what we can do to keep each other alive.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill | All rights reserved

Thanks for reading/listening. Please hit the like, share, or comment buttons to help others find my work.