A Hidden Life

Still Life, 1859
Claude Monet

묵은지 김치는
진득-하니,
그저 오래-동안 묵어질때까지 기다렸다가 꺼내 먹는 것이 제맛이라고.
중간에 자꾸 뚜껑을 열었다 닫았다
꺼냈다 집어넣었다하면
김치가 제대로 묵어지지를 않는다고.
아빠가 예전에 그러셨던 것이 갑자기 생각났다.
아래 포스팅을 하면서.
무슨연관인지는 생각하기 귀찮고.
여하튼 저것이 생각나니
George Eliot의 Middlemarch 마지막 부분이 이어 생각난다:


Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. [...]
But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.


이여자가
묵은지 김치 비슷한 것이 되고 싶나보다.
one of the obscure. the unknown.