TITLE: A Certain Vacation

Are we going on vacation, or have we already arrived? A temporary break from what we originally did, a vacation. Isn’t marriage a vacation from being alone? Isn’t illness a vacation from being healthy? For the poet Cheon Sang-byeong, life was already a vacation. Are the living on vacation and the dead at work? Or was there ever an original state to begin with? Is life the original state or is death? Is reality the original state or is it a dream? Is the butterfly Zhuangzi, or is Zhuangzi the butterfly? Or is the butterfly just a butterfly, and Zhuangzi just Zhuangzi? But then, what are the butterfly and Zhuangzi as their original states? So, there is no original state. There is no vacation to begin with. Therefore, we cannot know if we are going on vacation or if we have already arrived. We are either on a vacation of unknown origin or at work with an unknown purpose.

AUTHOR: NamHo Kim (Korea, Republic of)