The Authentic Origin: First Memories of Infinity and Death

2013 노트에서 발췌

The Beginning of Infinity

When I first thought about “infinity,” I must have been around seven. We lived in a house with a small yard, and I loved digging into the dirt, collecting fallen leaves, and watching the tiny creatures that moved between them. When I dug into the ground, a hidden world suddenly appeared. Spaces I had never seen cracked open, revealing another layer beneath. The damp, cold smell of earth and the way it crumbled softly between my fingers were everything I knew. Yet that space felt entirely different from the yard I thought I understood—deep, unfamiliar, and holding a kind of secret. What I felt then was not simple curiosity but the first recognition of a world that might have no end.

Among the things revealed beneath the ground, the one that struck me the most was the earthworm. A being without arms or legs, quietly heading somewhere. Each time its smooth, pink body pushed and parted the soil, I felt a kind of wonder I couldn’t explain. The fact that such a small and simple creature could move forward without knowing where it was headed, simply by following its own way of passing through the world, was strangely shocking to me. Its repeated motion—bending and extending—felt almost miraculous.

Eventually, I placed a worm on a leaf and brought it inside, trying to imitate the way it moved. I remember scraping my stomach on the floor yet still inching myself forward. I was proud that I had managed to mimic a movement so different from my own, and I even showed it to my parents as if it were a small performance. After that, I searched for worms often, sometimes for long stretches of time, just to watch them. Over time, they stopped appearing to me as simple creatures crawling over the soil. Their continuous, unbroken movement felt like a kind of force passing through the world. The rhythm that seemed to have no beginning or end looked like a cycle of life that would continue somewhere even if its form disappeared.

The infinite wasn’t something grand or distant—it was already unfolding in the soil beneath my hands. Looking back, I think I was already wondering what else might be hidden there, even if I couldn’t say it aloud. The strangeness of encountering a life so unlike mine held me in place. Like sunlight shifting across the grains of dirt, changing color with every angle, the world’s connections seemed to extend through unseen currents. That must have been the first moment when I began to think. I must have sensed something like a flow.

The Recognition of Death

The first time I felt something like “death” was when my grandfather passed away. But the experience didn’t come to me through an understanding of loss or emotional upheaval. As a child, I could only take in the sensory impressions filling the hospital hallway—the smell of alcohol, the cold floor, the dim lights, and the heavy expressions on the adults’ faces, whose reasons I couldn’t yet grasp. Perhaps because I couldn’t understand any of it, the scene stayed unusually vivid.

But the moment when the meaning of death settled into me for the first time came years later, when I was in middle school. One morning, as I looked out over the small clearing beyond my bedroom window, I saw a half-fallen tree with a small bird perched on it, singing brightly in the early sunlight. The air was strangely clear and full of life, yet the fractured tree, split open and holding darkness inside its trunk, drew my eyes first. And above it, a small life continued to sing.

That scene was the first time death and life appeared together in a single frame. The entire hour of that morning remains intact in my memory. I felt that the two weren’t distant concepts but were somehow placed within the same movement. Because of that, death didn’t feel like an ending. It felt more like something that continued differently—held in what remained.

Even though the stopping of a life felt quietly sad, I didn’t take death as disappearance. To me, it was a shift in relation, a movement to another form. The reason that moment stayed with me was because it belonged to a space I couldn’t clearly explain. It stayed in my mind even when I didn’t understand it, and for the first time I wanted to know why something happened the way it did. I couldn’t name what it was back then, but I sensed that the world wasn’t made only of things that simply begin or end. Something else was at work.

Between Infinity and Death

Infinity did not first appear to me as a grand idea, but as the sense that the world existed beyond what I knew. I didn’t understand what continued or how, but I could feel that the world moved in ways I couldn’t see. Death, too, felt less like erasure and more like a moment when the conditions of existence changed. I had no language for this difference, but the sensation of digging through soil and the sound of the bird in the clearing had already taught me something about it. Those memories became the earliest points through which I recognized the world’s structure.

Looking back, almost everything I came to think about afterward probably began from there. I am still, in a way, digging into that soil, still hearing the bird on the fallen tree. But now I no longer see those scenes simply as childhood memories—they became the first images that showed how the world alters its forms and how things remain connected.

Infinity was never far away; it was always rising from beneath my feet. And death was not an interruption but a brief change in direction within that continuity. Perhaps from that time on, I sensed that I too belonged to that structure. The desire to understand what I couldn't grasp, the urge to ask why I exist at all—those questions must have started quietly around then.

How Earthworms Move, They Say

The direction and purpose of an earthworm's movement are primarily determined by instinctive reactions (Taxis) essential for survival.

1. Principles of Direction Determination

Avoidance of Light (Negative Phototaxis): Earthworms sense light through light-sensitive cells in their skin and dislike it, moving away from the light source (towards darkness).
Preference for Humidity (Positive Hydrotaxis): Since earthworms breathe through their skin, they must avoid drying out. They therefore favor areas with high humidity and move in that direction.
Detection of Food/Chemicals (Chemotaxis): Earthworms detect chemical signals from organic matter (such as fallen leaves and decaying plants) in the soil and move towards areas rich in food.

2. Main Purposes of Movement

The earthworm does not 'plan' a destination or route but constantly moves in search of environmental stimuli necessary for survival.

Seeking Food: This is the most crucial objective. They move towards and consume nutrient-rich soil.
Reproduction (Mating): When the environment outside the soil is damp, such as after rain, predators are less active, and their bodies do not dry out, making it safe. Thus, they often move to the surface for mating.
Respiration: If the soil becomes oversaturated with water due to heavy rain, causing a lack of oxygen, they temporarily move to the surface to breathe.

In conclusion, the earthworm's movement is an immediate reaction to subtle environmental changes (light, humidity, chemical signals), and these reactions collectively form the larger flow of survival and species preservation.

Source: Synthesis of content from general biology and animal behavior science educational materials and encyclopedic sources.

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