There is a particular vanity in believing one has struck a "balance" in life — as though existence were a ledger one might reasonably keep tidy, debits and credits settling neatly by December. Writing on Yang Gwi-ja's Mosun last week, I found myself circling the novel's analytical bones and never quite touching the marrow: Jin-jin, weighing her aunt's comfortable monotony against her mother's exhausting chaos, as if a life might be assembled from the better halves of two others.
I confess I did the same, once. I drew up my own private ledger — the disciplined years of research against the reckless ones of love — and convinced myself the sum would eventually balance. It never has. If anything, the years have only widened the columns.
Perhaps this is where the Korean sensibility outpaces the English one. We were raised to believe imbalance is a fault to be corrected — a matter for a firmer diary, a longer walk, a stricter Sunday. Jin-jin's world suggests something closer to Buddhist acceptance instead: that the scales were never meant to rest, and the trying is the whole of the exercise, not merely the means to it.
I poured myself something Scottish before writing this, and did not measure it carefully. Small rebellions.
