“네가 어떻게 너 자신을 사랑하는지를 보고 다른 사람들이 너를 그렇게 사랑하게 된다. How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you.”
– 인도 태생 캐나다의 페미니스트 시인 루피 카우르(Rupi Kaur, 1992- )
‘일찍 알았으면 좋았을 삶의 8개 진실’
1. “네가 사랑하는 사람 누구나 다 죽는다. Everyone you love is going to die.”
2. “우린 우리 삶에 의미를 부여한다. 삶이 의미 없다고 네가 느낀다면 그 건 네 잘못이다. We give our lives meaning. If you feel like life is meaningless, that’s your fault.”
3. “완전한 배우자 짝이란 존재하지 않는다. 네가 좋아하는 자질, 너와 같은 가치관을 지닌 사람을 찾아 환상적인 관계를 맺도록 하라. The perfect partner doesn’t exist. Concentrate on finding someone who has a lot of qualities you like, and the same values and build a fantastic relationship.”
4. “인생은 하나의 게임 놀이이다. 네가 하고 싶은 놀이를 선택해 그 게임의 규칙을 익혀서 성공하도록 하라. Life is a game. Find games you want to play, learn the rules, and find a way to be successful at the games you selected.”
5. “모든 건 끝난다. 젊음도, 사랑도, 인생도, 다 끝나기에 이 모든 게 다 가치와 보람이 있다. Everything ends. Youth, love, life, all end, and that’s what makes them valuable.”
6. “작은 일에서 낭만을 찾아라. Be romantic about the little things.”
7. “큰일에 현실적이어야 한다. 인생이 영화가 아니기에 예술가의 야심을 품되 엔지니어의 철저한 계획을 짜야 한다. Be a realist about the big things. Life isn’t a movie, you need to have a plan, have an artist’s ambitions but an engineer’s mindset.”
8. “어떤 일을 하거나 문제를 풀어가기 위한 방법과 도리, 하나의 방도(方道/方到)를 내지 못하겠거든 불평하지도 마라. Figure out a way or don’t complain.”
이상의 8개 인용문을 하나로 줄여보자면 ‘작은 일에서 낭만을 찾으라’가 되지 않을까. 어린이들 소꿉놀이하듯 살라는 뜻이어라.
올해 가을 미국과 영국에서 출간된 우생(愚生)의 졸저(拙著) ‘코스미안 랩소디(Cosmian Rhapsody)’에 실린 단문(短文) 셋을 영문 그대로 아래와 같이 옮겨 본다.
1. Nostalgia for Analog
Vitamin water® was offering $100,000 if you could stay off smartphones for a year.
To enter the contest, you needed to submit a post on Twitter or Instagram (so, yes, perhaps using a smartphone), and outlining what you’d do if you couldn’t swipe or scroll for a year. The deadline to enter was January 8, 2019.
The company would select a contestant around January 22, 2019, according to the contest rules, and give them a 1996-era cell phone. For the next year, if you got chosen, you could not use any smartphones or tablets at all, even those belonging to other people, but you could use laptops and desktop computers. Devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo were OK too.
If you could go a full year carrying around something like what Cher used in the iconic teen comedy “Clueless,” you would win $100,000. If you lasted six months, you would get $10,000.
Oh, and Vitaminwater® would be verifying your honesty. Before receiving the money, the contestant would need to submit to a lie-detector test.
Vitaminwater® liked challenging monotony, Natalia Suarez, the company’s associate brand manager, told CNBC Make It.
“We don’t think there’s anything more boring than mindless- ly scrolling through your phone, and this is an opportunity to take that stance against routine and give someone $100,000 to do something uniquely awesome with their time,” she said.
Reading this news as reported on December 13, 2018, by Megan Leonhardt @Megan_Leonhardt CNBC.com, I was overcome with acute nostalgia for my analog days in my youth.
What I read in my teens in an article has been incubating in my mind, or rather in my heart ever since.
The writer of the article posited that silent, black and white movies were better than those of technicolor with sound- tracks; novels were better than films; poems were better than novels, for each of the viewers or readers could exercise freely one’s infinite imagination about the colors, figures, voices of the characters, and sights and sounds of all the scenes.
This argument seemed to be in the same vein as claims that clothed women were much more attractive, mysteriously more beautiful than naked ones; the unspoken words left unsaid were more convincing and lasting than those spelled out; the hand-written correspondence was more touching than a telephone conversation.
American essayist/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882) must have meant the same when he said:
“Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.”
Then, perchance, the old-fashioned arranged marriages and romancing by long, long love-letters are much more intimate and enduring than the current lightning-quick ‘speed dating’ scene.
The soundless music, wordless communion, unseen vision and the like may overcome all our senses, time and space, even life and death, to boot, perhaps.
Who’s to say that the ideal is not meant to be realized?
2. Cyborg is Cosmian
‘Cyborg’ is an abbreviation for ‘cybernetic organism,’ meaning the combination of an organism and the inorganic/ inanimate matter like machines.
As Tesla CEO Ellon Musk(b. 1971) declared on June 2, 2016, we’re all “already cyborgs,” nowadays, we’re living in the so-called ‘Hyper-Connected’ society through the internet network. Aren’t we?
From time immemorial, our ancestors (in the East) practiced ‘축지법(chukjipob)’ in Korean and 縮地法 in Chinese characters: a method of making a long distance close in by the magic of contracting space.
Since machines like bicycles, automobiles, and airplanes were invented, not only the distance over the land but also over the water of rivers and oceans were contracted by ships and balloons. These days, even the space of the universe/multiverse is being abridged. Isn’t it?
I can’t help recalling an episode in my youth. In 1959 when I graduated from college, I met my first love, whom I started calling my Cosmos, a symbol of my favorite flower cosmos representing the whole Cosmos.
One day, we went to see a film, The Brothers Karamazov. Waiting in the second-floor lobby for the next showing, she asked me if I wanted to go to the bathroom. I didn’t feel like going, but I went anyway. The entrances to the men’s and women’s bathrooms were side by side. I stood for a moment in front of the urinal and a thought crossed my mind that I and my Cosmos were not far apart with only a wall between us. I realized that if the distance between us was shortened by just a few feet, I could be in her. At the very moment, I experienced the contraction of the space.
Thereafter, I never felt lonesome again. Anytime, any- where, I could feel close to anybody. If the whole universe were compressed into a single dot, one could be united with all. No doubt, this must have been a foresight of what’s to come.
Come to think of it further, would the ‘organism’ be really so different from the inorganic/inanimate matter?
In most recent years, organ transplants became no more unusual, and medical surgeries, housekeeping chores, etc., are being done more efficiently by robots. Even sex partners are being replaced by ‘real dolls (life-size sex dolls),’ believe it or not. A while ago, it was reported that DNA-edited twins were born in China.
Besides, we are familiar with the phenomena, such as ESP (extra sensory perception), NDE (near-death experience) and the like, which cannot be explained by science.
That’s why, I gather, Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1767) sighed:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Likewise, perhaps, one can have no choice but to soliloquize:
All things in the Cosmos, no matter whether they appear to be breathing organisms or inorganic/inanimate mater that seems to have stopped breathing, are none other than “I” myself, the microcosm of the Cosmos, namely, Cosmian.
3. To See a Flicker of Eternity in Moments
“In losing my future, the mundane began to sparkle.”
This is what Kate Bowler says, an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, the author of ‘Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved,’ published in 2018. She found out at age 35 that she had stage IV cancer, having had finally had a baby son with her childhood sweet- heart.
“Christian theology has rich categories for the future,” she writes, “about the kingdom of God…But the sicker I became, the more ‘hope’ was a word that pointed to the unbearable: a husband and a baby left behind, an end without an ending …As far as I was concerned, it poisoned the sacred work of living in the present.”
Would this be the story of Kate alone? When we think about it, aren’t we all, each and every one of us, terminal, born to die, sooner or later?
And yet, for tens of centuries, people have been brain- washed and indoctrinated that no matter what you do against humanity in this life, you can be redeemed only by the blood of somebody and enter the kingdom of God. It goes without saying that the ‘indulgencies’ and the ‘admission tickets’ to Heaven are still being sold all over the world in all it's various guises.
How and why people fail to get enlightened and realize that there is neither the past nor the future but the present; that how you live in the moment at present determines the past and the future; that when you like and love someone or something, you make the heaven on earth, whereas you bring about the hell on earth when you dislike and hate somebody or something; and that whether it’s a person’s look, landscape, seascape or skyscape, it changes constant- ly from moment to moment, one look or a view only at a time, once and for all, never to be repeated.
To borrow a sentence from Prof. Bowler’s Opinion column article “Hope Isn’t Only About the Future,” published in The New York Times Sunday Review, December 30, 2018:
“This is transcendence, the past and the future experienced together in moments where I can see a flicker of eternity.”
So it’s perforce just “to see a flicker of eternity in moments” for us all Cosmians while we are visiting, briefly, this planet Earth on our cosmic journey, trickling into the Sea of Cosmos.
[이태상]
서울대학교 졸업
코리아타임즈 기자
합동통신사 해외부 기자
미국출판사 Prentice-Hall 한국/영국 대표
오랫동안 철학에 몰두하면서
신인류 ‘코스미안'사상 창시
전명희 기자
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