J. Epstein 3] "여든을 맞으며"

 

Joseph Epstein, The Ideal of Culture: Essays (2018) 에 실린

에세이 중 이번엔, 저자가 여든이 되는 2017년에 발표한, "Hitting

Eighty" 에서 몇 구절을 아래에 인용한다.

 

88세인 장모님이 매일 아침 잠에서 깨어나서는 당신이 자면서 세상을

뜨지 못했다고 "제기랄!" 하고 투덜대신다는 친구가 있다.

 

[이렇게 번역을 시작하다가 만다. "Human nature remains for

me endlessly fascinating" 같은 문장을 번역으로는 아무래도 읽는

재미가 원문만 못하겠고 그건 아깝다는 생각이 들기도 해서다.]

 

At 80, I remain ... still amused by the world. I find myself

more impressed than ever by the mysteries of life, not least

among them unmotivated altruism. In its elusiveness, human

nature remains for me endlessly fascinating.

 

I have friends my age contemplating triathlons, or who play

tennis, singles, for 90-minute stretches. My own greatest

athletic accomplishment at 80 is that I can still put on my

trousers while standing up.

 

Eighty is not without its pleasures. one is that one sees

the trajectory of others' lives and careers.

 

Again, I think of my own good luck through life. Going to

the University of Chicago, which I did in a blindly stumbling

way, turned out to be a crucial step, giving me a primitive

but genuine sense of a high culture foreign to my upbringing

but which nonetheless seemed worth attempting to attain.

 

My luck seems to have held out, for thus far I haven't run

out of things to write about.... We are all autodidacts. The

only difference is that I, because of a certain small skill

acquired over the years at constructing sentences, happen

to have conducted my self-education in public.

 

Santayana wrote that whatever one's age, one should

always assume that one still has a decade left to live.

 

As for books, I mentioned to someone the other day that I

was slowly reading my way through Theodor Mommsen's

majestic four-volume History of Rome. "You don't read

any crappy books, do you?" he said. With the grave

yawning, I replied, why would I?

 

I have given the current batch of English novelists --

Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie

-- a fair enough shot to realize I need read no more of

them: their novels never spoke to me, and are less likely

than ever to do so now. I glimpse poems in the New

Yorker ... but none stick in the mind, and poor poetry itself

has come to seem little more than an intramural sport,

restricted in interest largely to those people who continue

to write the stuff.