제목 자체에 매료되어 버린 '엉망인 채 완전한 축제'

Between Two King by Suleika Jaouad

It’s very rare to meet such a book whose title itself tells more than its content. The book “Between Two Kingdoms” - written by Suleika Jaouad - is such a book. My eyes were caught and stayed at the title. Even I didn’t think of moving into pages.

This book is a story of one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery. Her key takeaway from this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

This book’s title was translated into “엉망인 채 완전한 축제” in Korean. This translated title is much more insightful and poetic than its original version - Between Two Kingdoms. I admire the translator of this book. If I translate back from “엉망인 채 완전한 축제” into English, it could be “Full of Joy along with Full of Despair”.

If you can be fully joyful even when you are fully desperate, of course, you can be fully joyful when you are not in such a extreme despair. If you have reasonable and common-sense definition of happiness, actually, you cannot procrastinate to be happy. You don’t need to do it and even you can’t. But too easily we not only think it should be, but we also think it can be. Happiness exists only for now. If you fail to enjoy it now fully, it disappear just at this moment. That’s the reason why you have to be fully joyful even along with full of despair. These two kingdom - Full of Joy and Full of Despair - will always exist concurrently. The ideal relationship between these two might be ‘stand alone and communicating’ one not ‘cause-effect and competing’ one.