Choi In-hun - The Square
I suddenly wonder if Lee Myeong-jun hadn't chosen to go to the neutral country, he might not have thrown himself into the sea. I recall the life in the neutral country he spoke of when he chose that path. Within it, there was no trace of the ideologies, love, or existential human questions he had wrestled with fiercely his entire life. But was that truly his nature? Could he have lived stably, detached from thought? Could he have genuinely embraced and lived a life like the one he mused about after choosing the neutral country—working as a hospital security guard or a village firefighter, living without anguish, simply going with the flow? I believe it was impossible. In the end, he might have ended his life on the rooftop of some building in a neutral country, unable to cast off the body he couldn't abandon on the ship. And he, too, must have vaguely sensed that this was his fate. That he couldn't control his own nature. That a life of merely getting by was never meant for him from the moment he was born. So I think again. If I were Lee Myeong-jun back then, what choice would I have made? I would probably have chosen South Korea. Though I had no one left to love or to whom I could attach myself on either side, at least in South Korea, wasn't there a shred of freedom remaining? Wasn't there even a sliver of hope left to freely express my nature within that freedom? I would agonize and wrestle between the people I lost and the painful times experienced because of my nature, and the fact that I cannot abandon that nature. But I would have chosen South Korea, not merely to survive, but to truly live life. For leaving for a neutral country is ultimately no different from throwing oneself into the sea of nothingness.