Question: When is a quote Cool?
Answer: Not the sort of cool we learned in adolescence.
According to the unscientific Cool Quotes Survey (margin of error +/- 50%), 91.4% of adolescents long to sit across the lunchroom at the table with the Cool Kids. Another 2.7% of adolescents didn’t waste any precious emotional bandwidth on the snooty kids at that table. That leaves 5.9% of adolescents who do not sleep well, having basked in the glow of coolness all day at school without any idea how they got that cool or what they might need to sacrifice tomorrow to maintain the privilege.
However Cool Quotes is not about being cool, it’s about seeking out, discovering, and lovingly appreciating Cool. The Cool Quotes Survey estimates that 89.7% of Cool Quotes originate from the approximately 52.2% of the population who managed to grow past adolescence while retaining a modicum of sanity. The Cool we seek here exists far beyond the reach of the Cool Kids table, ranging freely across human consciousness just waiting to be caught and then released.
But who of us has that eye and ear for Cool? Perhaps a little demo may shed some light. We sometimes use a mining metaphor to illustrate the process. Like most every metaphor, a mine is not perfect in this case. Most mines dark, close and confined, whereas the best of literature, culture and conversation is light, airy and exhilarating. In either case, however, it usually takes some digging to find the jewel. And we have to start out by picking a likely mountain, whether of dirt or of literature, to stick your pick axe into. Today we will try out the mountain range of Science Fiction and dive down a short story mine shaft named I’m Waiting for You by Kim Bo-young. In this case I was several pages in before the old axe struck at a somewhat promising paragraph…
“My dad lived his whole life in his hometown, but around the time he passed away it was like he’d traveled the entire world. In fact, he really did. By the time he passed away our hometown was a completely different place from where he was born. Buildings had been put up and roads laid, mountains flattened, and the courses of rivers diverted. Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?”
Okay, it’s at least a cool little idea, but as it is, too big a chunk for Cool Quotes. We will have to pick at it some more. The easiest place to start is to knock off a chunk of Bo-young’s context…
“My dad lived his whole life in his hometown, but around the time he passed away it was like he’d traveled the entire world. In fact, he really did. By the time he passed away our hometown was a completely different place from where he was born. Buildings had been put up and roads laid, mountains flattened, and the courses of rivers diverted. Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?”
That little word “him” feels a bit like it drops our literary jewel out of realm of timeless coolness, but to remove it or change it only seems to render it less cool, so we’ll just keep it…
“Time moved him to somewhere completely different. Who could possibly say that he lived in one place his whole life?”
What I rather like about this one is that taking it out of the context of the life of the protagonist’s father drops us into our own context. If we are willing to run with it, we find ourselves, even as we sit here reading, flying in and out of our little contexts at the dizzying speed of time itself.
I had my doubts for a bit there when I first picked up this little nugget, but doggone but it feels pretty cool now.
Bear in mind that we may read page after page of very cool context that is just so heavy with cool it’s impossible to pick a thread out of the rich fabric without finding it wither for lack of all that rich context. Or you may be finding very little pleasure in some long narrative or analysis, then suddenly find yourself stopped short by something amazing. You never know.
For now I’ll just go drop that tidbit from keyboard of Kim Bo-young right out into coolquotes.org. We may soon get a chance to enjoy it again as we cruise our way on through the great conversation.
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