Anatomy Of My Success > IDEAS & IDEALS

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After several frustrating as well as humiliating failures, I passed, at last, the driving test two weeks ago, and finally got my driver's licence in my hand. It took me full three months of sweat, agony and pressure. The weather was hot, the young instructors of my son's age in the driving school were blunt and each failure in the test was agonizingly painful and shameful. For a fifty-year old man whose bodily functions are not so good as they were, a small piece of laminated paper about half the size of my hand is indeed a certificate of no small success.

 

      I have been telling my 'success story' to everyone I met for more than a week as if I had earned a gold medal in the Olympic games. Now I realize, to my disappointment, that no one has shown as much interest in or enthusiasm for it as I expected. Some, of course, have responded with proper reaction, only out of courtesy and sympathy. Yesterday I managed to stop one of my friends, who had certainly not heard my story, and repeated it. He just nodded, smiled and went away without any comments. Now I find that no one would listen to me. I am very sad about this.

 

      What makes me sadder is the fact that I myself cannot revive the ecstasy of the moment any more. It is gone. With the disappearance of the spectators' applause the joy of success disappears too. Like the many other small successes in my life before, this one has already been melted into and merged with the trivialities of my everyday life, and buried deep in the oblivious sea of commonplaces.

 

      Why should, I ask with anger, the ecstatic joy that comes with every success we make, necessarily vanish and disappear so quickly, and be replaced inevitably with the routines, commonplaces and banalities of everyday life? Can it not last longer? Should it be so short-lived without exception? What is the use of success, then, if it, just like a strong drink, intoxicates our brain for a moment with its heavenly influence, and leaves us in a perpetual state of hangover?

 

       Since the ecstasy that my driver's licence brought to me has already gone from me, I am thinking of another success, victory or triumph that would be lying ahead of me, and that could possibly rescue me out of the long and somewhat tedious routines of my life. Love and romance with a young woman is definitely out of the question in all respects. I have taken all the exams required of me for my job. Chances of being invited by some foreign organizations or academic institutions and of traveling abroad by airplane are very, very slim, and even if they were given to me, I would not be so overjoyed, proud or triumphant as I was when I was young. I feel more security than pleasure with the grown-up children of mine. The keen, the painfully keen pleasure that I felt with them when they were just toddlers, when I fondled them, is gone. I find that there is virtually nothing that will make me jump for joy, or promise me another thrill of victory. Passing the driving test seems to have put a big and conspicuous full-stop mark to the short and incomplete sentence of my successes.

 

      Looking back, I find I have made small but many successes in my life. And whenever I made one, it was accompanied with the uncontrollable and unmanageable joy and pleasure, and it seemed to last for good and forever. It was so whenever I passed the crucially important exams in my life, and so was it when I won the love and married the woman whom I loved. It was so when I was called 'professor' by a student in the classroom for the first time in my life. It was so when my first English essay appeared with my photo in The Korea Times, and so was it when I bought my own apartment and moved in.

 

      However, the triumphant joy that accompanied each of the successes has all gone, gone so quickly. Like a glorious rainbow in the sky cleared by a bout of shower in a summer day, the glory of my success was so ephemeral, momentary, and so evanescent, despite the long, arduous, agonizing, and often shameful struggle against all the odds.

 

      By external standards I should admit that I am one of those many people who have succeeded. I own an apartment of moderate size, have my own office, a phone and a car. I wear white shirt and tie every morning and go to work. From time to time I eat at a very expensive restaurant at my own expense, and more often than not at other's. Intermittently I attend international seminar on English literature, where I ask questions in English. I have met several of the foreign ambassadors in Seoul and shook hands with them. Often I am asked to officiate at the wedding. I am constantly being solicited for donations to the alumni association. At present I am invited to a reception at the Convention Center of the Hilton Hotel next Thursday. The dishes will be fabulous, and all the successful people in the country will be there.

 

      But I am not happy. I am sad. Eating the fruits of my success everyday with no particular regret or appreciation, like a silkworm feeding ceaselessly on the mulberry leaves provided by the farmers, I feel I am becoming a chrysalis in a cocoon. I am going to live and die in the same apartment, on the same job, and in the same activities and vanities. There seems to be no new ventures, adventures or pursuits. No more risks, no dangers. Imprisoned in the cell of my meagre success, accustomed to the ease and comfort in it, I have become a tamed bird in a cage; eager to come out of it, but afraid to do so. I feel warm tears gathering in my eyes. Is this all? Is this all? Is this all?
                    (October 27, 1990)