Anton Hur’s “Toward Eternity”: A universe made of poetry

When I was an undergrad in university, in one of my art history or philosophy classes, I can’t remember exactly—we were given an assignment to write about depth: How would we represent it? How would we define it? I was extremely intrigued, but ultimately, I chose the alternate topic to write about because I was too intimidated. The one thing I could picture when I thought about depth was a blank page, a blank space, a white void. I pictured the end of things, the final understanding, when all the universe’s secrets are finally revealed. It sounded like death because perhaps that is the only state where we can see the totality of what it means to be alive.

The ending of Anton Hur’s English novel debut, Toward Eternity, reminded me of this assignment. Elegant and economical at 244 pages, this novel asks enormous questions and, sublimely, achieves something that feels like an answer at the end of all things: the arrival at some final understanding.

Toward Eternity tells the story of Yonghun Han, a literary researcher who is Patient One of a radical nanotherapy cancer treatment that consists of replacing the patient’s cells one by one until the entire body has been transformed into a “nanodroid” made up of “nanites.” One day, Yonghun disappears without a trace—only his clothes are left behind. The novel, built around a series of diary entries in a notebook passed down from one character to another throughout generations, unfolds like an investigation of this scientific and philosophical mystery.

One of the mysteries is related to the persistence of memory, including physical memory. Before Yonghun vanishes, Dr. Mali Beeko, one of the scientists investigating the enigma, notes that a scar on Yonghun’s wrist has reappeared, a sign that his “redundant body” is slowly returning. Yonghun had gotten the scar while cooking for his husband, Mali explains. Tied to a memory, Yonghun’s scar returns as proof of his human body’s existence before his nanotherapy. What remains of love after death? What are the markers, in the body or consciousness, of a life lived? Can a body without scars—without memory of its passage through the earth—be considered human or alive? Hur effortlessly lays these foundations in the novel’s first few pages and continues to build off the possible answers with vertiginous boldness as the story progresses.

Hur is an author and an extremely prolific and equally celebrated translator. His first collection of essays, in Korean, was published in 2023, and his translations of Bora Chung’s short story collection Cursed Bunny and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City were shortlisted and longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. When discussing his work as a professional translator, Hur is witty and honest, never afraid to talk about the practical realities of the book publishing industry or the struggles of championing the translation of Korean literature into English. Toward Eternity reveals his brilliant philosophical understanding of language.

As each character tells their story, we dive deeper and deeper into the exploration of what constitutes humanity’s essence. Is it the ability to create art? Or the ability to write poetry? Or is it rather the ability to understand or interpret poetry? Is it the awareness of mortality? Among all the possible explanations, the novel theorizes that language is at the heart of it. “Speaking to someone gives them humanity,” posits Roa, another recipient of nanotherapy many decades into the future. The side effects of the treatment first tested on Yonghun have escalated to catastrophic levels for Earth and humanity. Nanodroids, empty of poetry and human memory, populate the earth, efficient but all but faded iterations of a once human being.

From the start, language is a fundamental part of the story—Yonghun’s project is to teach an AI to understand poetry—but in this section of the book, we feel, more than ever, how language is a vessel for reality and words the expression of our physical experience of the world through the senses. To speak and to write is an act of creation of the being. “I’m becoming Russian, one word at a time,” says Natasha, a character who must assume a secret identity to survive.

The nanites that replace human cells one by one during nanotherapy can also be seen as a kind of language. In the same way humans need to communicate with one another to survive, coexist, and build community and civilization, the nanites’s survival depends on the legibility of code to function. Maybe the failure of the therapy on Yonghun—the return of his “redundant body”—was caused by an error of communication between the nanites. There is an implicit fear of the breakdown of communication, because, as Mali says at the beginning of the novel, “language is inadequate, but it’s all we have.”

So, while language is never sufficient to convey the full human experience, it could be argued that units of language is what the universe is made from: from matter to DNA, and then we replicate that in the way we interact with the world, from the development of languages to alphabets, to music notation, to source code.

Reading Toward Eternity made me experience a kind of vertigo of understanding, the moment when you fall backwards in your mind with the force of seeing, even if only briefly, the fabric of human life. In a way, in the novel, Hur investigates the totality of humanity’s essence by looking at the smallest possible unit (the nanite, the human cell) while also contemplating the enormity that the concepts of love, grief, memory or existence convey.

Toward Eternity is one of the most intellectually exhilarating books I have read in a long time. It dares to ask vital questions about the nature of humanity and then sets out to answer them with fearless imagination. Hur does this by bringing his arguments to their logical conclusion, many of which are chilling in their truth and darkness. He also goes beyond these conclusions and sets towards eternity, where one truth remains: humanity, like life, finds a way to survive. It pulses underneath, embedded in even the smallest part of ourselves, and eventually, it finds a way to endure and then, thrive.

Toward Eternity was published on July 9, 2024.