★ 2020 Wonbuk Wonbusan General Category Selected Books ★
★ 2019 National Library of Korea Librarian Recommended Books ★
★ Published in translations in Turkey, Vietnam, and Malaysia ★

Dong-A University's Best Lecturer, Selected as an Outstanding K-MOOC Lecture
Professor Lee Gook-hwan shares his thoughts on reading in an age of anxiety.

What changed my fate was,
It was a reading and writing of my own choosing.

The revised edition of Professor Lee Gook-hwan's reading essay, "To Those Who Live in the Morning, the Afternoon Is Also the Future," has been published, and he is a beloved professor among students and has been repeatedly selected as the best lecturer at Dong-A University.
After its publication in 2019, it was selected as a book recommended by librarians at the National Library of Korea, and in 2020, it was selected as one of the 'One Book One Busan', where Busan citizens read and reflected on the book together for a year.

This book contains 52 essays by Professor Lee Gook-hwan, containing his thoughts on reading, writing, and art.
Five of these are new articles included in the revised edition.
Through the author's solid reasoning and fresh perspective, you can encounter the weight of life found in art and philosophy, a love of reading and writing, the value of persevering through pain and anxiety, and the meaning of living in harmony with others.
The meaning of life can exist in places where we walk, wavering and worrying, rather than on a set path.
The book encourages those who live honestly, while wavering, worrying, and anxious, that even the afternoon that will soon come can become the future.

“The world is full of meaning.
The meaning of life is not in the destination I reach by striving to reach, but exists everywhere along the path I walk.
You just don't discover it yourself.
For those who live in the morning, the afternoon is also the future.
Every day lived honestly adds up to a life.
A life without anxiety is already a dead life.
We must embrace anxiety and move forward step by step.
In that anxiety, the meaning of life will appear clearly like a light at the end of a dark tunnel.” _pp. 165-166

I like the word 'book connection'.
--- From "First Sentence"

It is more important to read one book deeply and have the time to share your thoughts with others than to read ten books.
Immerse yourself in a book, and after you close the book, you can talk and communicate with people who have read the same book.
A good book shakes and ripples my hardened self.
When that ripple meets other ripples and ripples together, our rigid ego crumbles and we gain enlightenment about life.
--- p.102

When I was a child, I was Lucas.
Like Lucas in the novel, one day, thanks to a teacher who recommended books to me when I was young, I was able to stop crying and meet books as if by a miracle.
Since then, I have not been lonely or sad because I am no longer alone.
In the novel, Lucas is deeply hurt by his friends and family and eventually goes into the book, never to return.
The police searched for the missing Lucas, but no one has seen him since.
However, in the place where Lucas had disappeared, there was a book titled “The Most Beautiful Stories in the World.”
The novel ended like that, but I believe.
Lucas is not on the run, but is traveling through a beautiful and unfamiliar world.
Reading is an act of staying in the author's house and then leaving to build one's own house.
Lucas will stay in the book, heal his wounds, and come out into the world again.
So he will build his house firmly.

--- pp.117-118

What makes writing difficult is that it is the most random and accident-free activity in the world.
Now, with the development of social networks, writing is no longer a privilege reserved for a select few experts, but a right chosen by those who wish to enrich their lives.
Writing is a craft for understanding life, and with constant effort, anyone can become a master of their own life through writing.


Among the sixty-nine-year-old schoolgirl's assignments, there is one that I love the most.
This is a story about growing up as the eldest child, taking care of her mother even after getting married, paying for her younger siblings' tuition and getting them married, but not having a single ring on her own hand, written in front of a photo of her late mother.
In her writing, the mother in the photo whispers to her daughter, who is nearing seventy.
“You are my best daughter.” Her words comforted her life and gave meaning to her life until she was sixty-nine.
--- p.131

The bigger problem is that the communities we live in are not just.
Capitalism has dismantled communities and replaced them with markets.
Political, economic, and media powers have colluded in a covert manner, capturing the everyday lawlessness, corruption, and excessive desire for capital.
In schools and workplaces, competition among members has become a discipline rather than a virtue, with people being pressured to perform better than others.
Competition is about accepting others and helping each other grow, not suppressing or leaving others behind.
Yet, even universities, supposedly temples of intellect, rank students based on relative evaluation, differentiate professors' salaries based on performance, and rank departments based on employment rates.
If schools are like this, you can imagine what profit-seeking private companies are like.
When members internalize zero-sum competition, violence becomes the norm in that community, and the more intense the competition, the more violence creeps into us.
As Susan Sontag warned in “The Pain of Others,” we consume the spectacle of others’ suffering through violent movies, dramas, and even news, and become desensitized to the violence we inflict on ourselves.

--- pp.201-202

As the pandemic drags on, many people say they miss their normal daily lives.
But I wondered if those who said that had ever valued their daily lives.
Everyday life is amazing.
Routine is what we find most boring, but at the same time, it is also what we fear losing.
They feel tired and worn out from the difficulties of commuting to and from work, the repetitive tasks every day, and the same faces they see every day, but they also fear that this routine will be shattered by unemployment or retirement.
In order to escape from the daily routine, we fill the highways on weekends and spend time on leisure activities, but when we come back tired, it's back to the daily routine.
Today, too, our daily lives continue like this, wandering between boredom and anxiety.

--- p.286