The Jane Austen Remedy - Ruth Wilson [Korean Version]

 

As I have grown older, my body seems to have become more fragile, prone to frequent, minor ailments. Just recently, I lost a week to a stubborn cold. Last summer, I found myself shuttling back and forth to the internal medicine clinic nearly once a month, battling bouts of enteritis. There was always something fascinating about swallowing pills with alien-sounding names scrawled on a prescription pad and feeling the body recover shortly thereafter. The recovery was possible, of course, because the medication was precise; one does not cure a stomach virus with a cough suppressant. Understanding exactly why my body hurts and exactly what it needs is paramount.

The fact that we are being offered a prescription implies that we are already ill. An antidote is administered to neutralize a toxin that has entered the system. We have been handed this antidote, confirming our intoxication, yet the nature of the poison and the method of infection remain elusive. My limbs do not twist in agony, nor do I struggle for breath. There is no fever, no nausea. This poison is far more insidious; without a single physical symptom, it silently gnaws away at the mind and spirit. The name of this toxin is "Life," and it is transmitted primarily through the medium of "Shorts."

On the subway, on the bus, and even walking down the street, the vast majority of people have their heads bowed, phones in hand. I am no exception. We fix our gaze on videos that flash by in under a minute, consuming a fragmented world in near-infinite loops. Those who hide behind the online curtain chop the world—which must be viewed as a whole to be truly understood—into bite-sized pieces, reassembling them into addictive spectacles and deploying them with calculated precision. No one realizes they are being slowly poisoned by this toxic weaponry until it is too late. Symptoms only manifest in two scenarios: when the battery dies, or when the phone is left at home. But since we rarely tolerate such lapses, we effectively eliminate any opportunity to feel the symptoms of our own sickness.

We must neutralize this toxin before the condition becomes terminal. There is no medicine as effective as a book. If that book was written by someone born over two hundred years ago, all the better. To neutralize a poison, one requires an agent that provides an equal and opposite reaction. A book that operates on a completely different modality, containing the mindset of a human from two centuries past, exerts an excellent detoxifying effect against the toxicity of Shorts and modern existence. A book cannot be consumed if not as a whole; it is a world that opens only when one takes the time to look deeply. It cannot be arbitrarily chopped and altered by others, and the life contained within it flows with a frustratingly beautiful slowness. A more powerful counter-agent cannot be found anywhere else.

For those unaccustomed to reading, these words may sound confusing—yet it is precisely those people who are the most urgent candidates for this prescription. Merely reading blindly is not the cure. Just as with medicine, one must know which drug to take, the dosage, the timing, and the method of administration to see results. Similarly, one must know the proper method of reading to extract the toxicity of the "Short." I hope you will examine this prescription carefully and learn to use it correctly.