(Jan, 2025)
A Traveler, A Daydreamer
Upon reading the book, the word "sonder" came to my mind.
Sonder (coined 2012 by John Koenig) : The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.
In "Her", the Spike Jonze movie, Theodore said, “Sometimes I look at people and make myself try and feel them as more than just a random person walking by. I imagine how deeply they've fallen in love, or how much heartbreak they've all been through.”
The awareness that everyone has a story. This is a book about it. It's easy to become caught up in our own lives and forget that every stranger we pass carries a world just as intricate as our own. I used to assume this thought dwells in everyone's mind, but maybe some of us, those who naturally slip into daydreams, find ourselves drawn to it more often.
I love how the protagonist always has so much going on in his head. The book feels like a diary, like talking to oneself, or like peeking into someone's mind where thoughts and trivial actions intertwine.
From Zero to Infinite
Jihun assigns people with numbers. The woman designated that then he must be 0. 0 carries both nothing and the beginning of everything. By reducing himself to a number, Jihun abandoned identity, as if traveling allows him to exist without the burden of being someone in particular. By doing so, he becomes an observer more than a participant in the world around him.
A saying of Pessoa reflects similar idea: “Posso imaginar-me tudo, porque não sou nada (I can imagine myself as everything because I am nothing)." Once a person embraces nothingness, he is free to take on infinite possibilities. Like Jihun's journey, starting as 0, he gathers the stories of those he meets, filling himself with the worlds of others.
Perhaps this is the meaning of traveling—not just about moving from place to place, but about absorbing the world, seeing people as more than just passersby, and learning their stories and minds. Like Jihun, we start as zero, but grow into infinite numbers along the way.
