Currently listening to:

instagram – blue.D cover

the perfect song for a lazy, wistful day,

where you’re already feeling nostalgic

for a city you’re still living in ♪ ٩( ´ω` )و ♪

🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑

Memories made for myself.

Memories made with friends I love,

as beautiful and evanescent as a breeze,

fluttering through a silk curtain.

Memories that will stay with me long after my stay at Oxford is over 🙂

Walking past Westgate, a shopping center at the heart of Oxford,

I saw that someone had set up an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque playground for kids,

complete with croquets and shiny little balls.

Could there be anything quite so Oxford?

Weather that calls for constant picnics.

We celebrated my friend Jess’s birthday by sitting on the grass in University Parks,

eating sandwiches, and sipping elderflower soda,

while Lou attempted a few card tricks that left us unexpectedly impressed.

The next day, I had another picnic with my friend Katie,

writing essays under the hot blaze of the suddenly bold sun.

Sometimes, the mere kiss of wind on your skin, the stir of spring through your hair,

is enough to make you feel acutely alive. Acutely happy.

I wish we had taken photographs that day, but it was also one of those moments

that don’t need to be captured so much as lived, and remembered, and cherished…

May your days be as full of mellow sunshine as we enjoyed that day, Jess 🙂

On a whim, I peeked into Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art the other day by myself.

They had an exhibition on the forces that shape and destabilize our ideas of home,

labor, equality, and the construction and deconstruction of cherished ideals.

Disorder. Chaos. Materials for building scattered about like trash.

It left me with a feeling of deep sadness, although it was also very challenging.

Is there any way we can use the small and breakable lives we are given,

to build up, instead of causing disorder and disarray in a planet already splitting apart? 🙁

Lou, Jess, and I went to The Bear, a lovely old pub from the 13th century,

tucked away in a corner of Oxford. According to urban legend,

the pub is called “The Bear” because it used to have a hollow pit in the ground

where dogs and bears would fight while noblemen watched and placed bets. Hmm…

A little grisly, but the food was good, so I ate without moral compunction.

For two hours or more we launched into a fervent discussion of Harry Potter,

in which we began sorting everyone we knew into their respective houses.

I am, by all counts and preferences, a Ravenclaw.

“It just feels so right,” Lou said, laughing,

“that we’re sitting in a pub built hundreds of years ago, at Oxford,

sorting people into magical houses. Like it couldn’t be any other way.”

I couldn’t help but agree.

This week, my love affair with Blackwell’s Bookshop has reached an unconscionable extent.

Against my better judgment, my afternoons always end with my swerving into the bookshop,

drifting slowly around the mounds of beautiful paperbacks, picking up a random novel,

and getting (oh, deliciously) lost.

I’ve been reading almost a novel a day, and am so much the happier for it! 🍒

Rereading “My Name is Lucy Barton,” a novel by one of my favorite writers of all time

(Elizabeth Strout),

I nearly sobbed aloud in public.

Her writing never fails to be quietly, wrenchingly, unexpectedly moving,

conjuring deep warmth without unnecessary drama,

tugging at the heartstrings so quietly you don’t notice until all of your walls have come down.

Back at my dormitory, working on my homework.

Reading McEwan’s descriptions of London protests while in England.

Thinking about our small outcry of free will against the looming backdrop of fate.

Was it fate that brought me to this city (or Fate with a capital F, as my tutor likes to say)?

It feels like it. It feels like I was meant to experience this place.

It feels, not as if I’ve worked my way here, but like a gift:

Spontaneous. Surprising at every turn.

Night falls slowly over Oxford, washing the pale old buildings with liquid blue.

Oh, how I love my days here.

How I love this life, wandering among mazes of book after book.

Goodnight, Oxford ✨

Goodnight. ✨

Goodnight ! ✨

🌻🌻🌻🌻

..

안녕하세요 !

Hello everyone! It’s me, Esther. Long time no see 🙂

It’s been two weeks since I’ve returned to Oxford,

and the city has clothed itself in new splendor during my absence…

..

The meadow behind my dormitory, which had been russet-colored,

flat, and gray, is awake and laughing with a thousand

dancing tulips and flowers.

The bare, spindly trees I had never given a second thought to

blossomed suddenly with a flood of white cherry blossoms.

..

During my time in Korea, I’ve been thinking a lot about

how moments pass by so quickly –

those fleeting, ungraspable, shining experiences

that make up this short and painful, sometimes lovely life.

I want to focus more on living those moments,

rather than capturing and reinventing them.

Sometimes we get so busy trying to construct a narrative

out of what we’ve been given, we fail to cherish those moments,

so complete and entire in themselves…

..

So, my posts this term might be more haphazard,

medleys of pieced memories rather than finished pieces,

glimpses of photographs rather than continuous videos.

But they’ll still be here, and they’ll keep coming

until my time at Oxford is over!

The Philosophy and Theology Faculty Library!

I always admired its beauty as I walked past it,

but my philosophy major friend got me to actually peek into it.

My postcards to my parents in Korea

(and my professor in America)

safely arrived! My mom had been feeling pretty sick,

but she said she’d been cheered up by my letter,

so it made my day, too 😀

Fresh strawberries from Gloucester Green,

a farmer’s market fifteen minutes away from my dorm, hehe

(*´◡｀​*) feeling glowy and content

because milk tea and intermittent warm weather.

every day should always be so happy~

..

This week I’ve been writing a lot of poetry.

There was this one afternoon

where I was browsing through Blackwell’s bookshop,

sipping tea and looking at The New Yorker, and then, a quotation by

Edwidge Danticat just hit me: “We cheat death every day.”

Or more literally, when translated from the Creole expression,

“We carry our coffins with us every day.”

Suddenly, a poem that had been simmering inside me

during my entire spring vacation in Korea,

erupted.

..

I sat down hastily and began scribbling in a frenzy,

almost as if drunk, seizing flyers and advertisements

to scrawl on because I had no paper at hand.

By the end of the afternoon I had six pages of poetry,

spilling out of me like wild bees.

..

What a gift it is to write.

Isn’t it funny that so much of my writing

returns to Korea,

and yet I can never quite write when I’m in it?

Too busy living to be writing, maybe.

Too busy laughing and crying,

in a way I never do when I’m abroad.

I admire people who write for writing’s sake.

Who say poetry is all they need. These are the real poets.

For me, poetry pales in comparison to life.

Writing is only ever a substitute

to what it means to love the people around me.

..

In any case, usually when I write about Korea, or my family,

it’s only in retrospection.

It’s only when I step into another country

that I can pick up my pen, sit down alone,

and start writing about what it means to go home. 🌷

(Um, disclaimer: this video has nothing to do with my blog post this week, haha…)

In the midst of the glitter and glamor of Oxford, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity this week to reflect on one of the issues nearest to my heart: the state of North Korea.

It’s rather lovely how famous speakers so frequently stroll casually into Oxford to give talks, a fair share of them completely free! One such talk this week was by John Everard, the former British diplomat to North Korea, and of course I skipped lunch to run there breathlessly. It was a funny, insightful, and gratingly realistic talk that reminded me forcibly of how urgent my country’s crisis still was.

John Everard was a tall, elegant man with white hair and bright eyes that were simultaneously gentle and fiercely alert; he carried himself gracefully, laughing easily and sympathetically. He opened his talk by reminding us of two vital things. “Firstly, North Koreans are people,” he stressed. “Day-to-day people who aren’t obsessing about how to obliterate the US or dominate the Korean peninsula. They’re people who worry about marriage, families, how to send their kids to school. And secondly, they’re Koreans. They’re not just defined by North Korea, but by their heritage of a very long, rich history. Also, they’re just generally nice people with a wicked sense of humor.” He flashed us a smile.

He went through photographs he had taken during his visits to North Korea, explaining the state of North Koreans’ current poverty, education, and love lives (he showed us a delightful photo of an ordinary North Korean couple on a date, staring mesmerized into each other’s eyes). He also said that their subways were much deeper underground than ours (in the US and in the South), because they also served as bunkers in the event of nuclear war. “If you get a power outage in there, it’s very nasty, I can tell you,” he said. “It gets so dark you can’t even see your own hand, and then you get a chance to hear every North Korean swearword at once.” He chuckled.

I loved his stories of the passionate North Koreans who survived in the midst of their hardship—like the teachers who copied out entire textbooks for their students by hand, and the young women who waded through bug-infested water to harvest their rice. But I also felt tears rise to my eyes at his photograph of the pretty young pharmacist, who had shown him a completely empty medicine cabinet and said that the only things she could offer to the sick were green tea and sympathy.

He was kind enough to answer my questions about several communist conspiracy theories in South Korea very insightfully, and ended his presentation with a sober reminder that the current state of North Korea was simply not sustainable, and that North Korea could actually start a nuclear war, especially in the light of recent tensions. The possibility of Trump attacking North Korea was also high, with estimates from White House insiders coming in at 30%. Everard remained suspicious about the North’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics this week. He reminded all the Britons in the room: “If this sucker goes down, the UK goes down with it. Don’t think we’re in any way exempt.”

Walking home, I felt myself burning hot and cold all over with all my unspoken thoughts. I felt sad, helpless, angry, grateful—how could I study at Oxford, while my people were copying out their few textbooks by hand and shivering without a fire? And yet, what an undeserved blessing, for me to be at a place where I could speak firsthand to a diplomat about the current state of my country! I wanted to rush out of school and do something—anything—to help my people. And yet, trying my best in my current situation, I supposed, was the first step to doing so. When I reached home I spent several hours writing applications for volunteer work with North Korean refugees during the summer. Lying in bed, I thought about one of the photographs Everard had shown us—a stark, barren wasteland in North Korea, with the faint outline of Chinese skyscrapers rising like a hazy mirage on the horizon. “North Koreans aren’t stupid,” Everard said. “Imagine sitting hungry and cold on this wasteland and looking out to those glittering skyscrapers, a rich world so far away—how would you feel?”

Indeed, I thought. How would they feel? And I promised myself sadly, all over again: I won’t forget. I won’t forget. However hard I study, however much I enjoy my life in America and in Oxford, I won’t forget what they endure, and what I owe to my country.

I love listening to conversations. People seldom realize the brightness of their own words: how they drop, glittering, from their lips without second thought. Like a magpie, I love catching each precious phrase in my palms, so that I can reflect over their flushed colors in private.

Conversations at Oxford are all the more interesting to think about, as they are so integrated with academic learning. People stroll around casually debating the usefulness of an omniscient being in thought experiments or the political ramifications of an economic model. Just a few days ago, as I waited in line for lunch, I listened to several students arguing fiercely about the different definitions of reality.

“So let’s say it’s true that the sun has a certain diameter. But that’s not the same as being necessarily true. Or being possibly true. It could be necessarily possible that x is true, or possibly necessary that x is true.”

“Yes, but for different semantics in objects…”

“I know, but I’m saying, the question is, how can we prove that there are six maximum possibilities for the reality of…”

Whoops. This was getting beyond my comprehension. Cradling my pasta in my hands, I edged gingerly away from them, as edified as I was entertained.

//

Outside the classroom, of course, such discussions tend to derail with all the elasticity of youth. My visiting student friends and I were enjoying curry and ramen together when we noticed Lynette carrying Heidegger’s Being and Time with her. “For fun,” she said, cheerfully. “I really enjoy reading Heidegger.”

“For fun?” we cried, gaping at her in horror.

“Heidegger? Do you mean Heineken?” interjected Lou helpfully. “Oh wait, that’s a beer brand.”

“For shame,” said Jess sternly, “it’s common table manners to know your Heidegger.”

“Yes,” said Lynette, smiling, “I enjoy him and Albert Camus very much.”

“Albert Camus?” Lou exclaimed. “I know an Albus. Albus Dumbledore.”

“Yes, Camus was a famous French philosopher,” said Berlin, nodding. “He had some very interesting views.”

“Camus’s The Stranger is so disturbing,” I said with a shudder.

“Yes,” Lynette said gravely, “with its famous first lines: ‘Mother died today.’”

“—‘Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure,’” I joined her. Those two lines carried such unsettling meaning—or lack of meaning, as Camus might argue. We were silent for a moment, and then Lou said, “Camus? Do you mean Caboose? Albus Caboose?”

Berlin smiled mildly and stirred his ramen, ever the peacemaker. “Let’s talk about the weather instead.”

//

It is difficult not to talk about academic subjects, however, as so much of your time is spent reading, writing, breathing them! As I wrote several essays on the boundaries of reality and theatricality in Jane Austen and the impact of 18^th-century female namelessness on Freudian theory, I found myself also thinking about my life, and writing to my sisters, in the light cast by my recent studies.

My philosophy professor at Whitman once said that our everyday life is “stereoscopic”: that there is someone living within this embodied imagination as if this scene could be right out of this novel and yet is just this scene. That I should pay attention to deja vus, where my past conflates with my present, and when the theories I learn or the novels I read echo loudly into my own life.

And isn’t that, after all, the joy of learning? To reflect and know more about how the world works, so you can begin to know yourself? Oxford has compelled me to think not only more deeply about my favorite authors, but also about this complex, self-contradictory thing called my own life. I have come to question my own performativity: to what extent am I adapting myself to societal structures, or sacrificing sincerity for survival? And my own relationships: if I feel so uncomfortable with the “happy ending” marriages for Burney and Austen’s heroines, what kind of “happy ending” do I really want for myself?

Like literature, life is never easy to analyze. Both resist easy answers. Yet I am grateful for the opportunity to do so, and to continue to be amused and moved by the way other students also grapple with everything they learn, as they shape their supple and ever-growing lives.