Essaytoon book on escape and choice in Korea: Little Sketchbook

Little Sketchbook, read on a mountain road in Danyang, Chungcheongbuk-do

This is how I have been spending my weekends lately. I drive up a mountain road somewhere in Danyang, Chungcheongbuk-do.

There is a personal healing spot there that is perfect for reading. The book I read there last weekend was Little Sketchbook.

I found this book while looking for essay-book recommendations. It is written with a calm but deep resonance. This essaytoon (illustrated essay comic), which would look lovely sitting in a book café, holds Sanghyeon's story, gently knocking on the reader's heart from its very first page.

A square-format essaytoon to keep or give

This somewhat special essaytoon, packed snugly into squares, is a book I think would be wonderful to keep for myself or give to someone precious.

Each concise line inside its squares is both a memory that made us who we are today and a record that will shape who we become. As I read them one by one, my eyes slowly drift closed and I fall asleep for a moment; when I wake up and read again, I feel good.

A story that begins with wanting to run away

The recommended essay book Little Sketchbook begins with “the desire to run away.”

The first escape the author describes was leaving school at eighteen. Family circumstances and pain in both mind and body piled up, and from a deep corner of the heart, the word “escape” began to creep forth.

That first escape, resolved upon and chosen with difficulty, became the measure that determined the direction of this person's life afterward. The author of Little Sketchbook is trapped in a wavering heart and uncertainty, but eventually learns, however faintly and little by little, how to take the next step right in front of them. In other words, how to stay composed before choices they have made themselves at life's crossroads.

And they learn how to take responsibility for those choices, too. In the end, after repeating countless trials, they come to learn with a heart made gentler how to embrace more tightly the life before them that they once wanted to push away—and how to become transparently strong in order to embrace it.

Lines that overlap with my feelings from my twenties until now

Reading these passages, I begin to wonder whether the contents of Little Sketchbook hold the actions and feelings I have lived through from my early twenties to now, in my thirties.

Life's trials are hard and can break, but we come to realize that this strength can be woven together with gentleness as one body. We, too, can be strong and gentle, and a heart that is strong and gentle lets us live and love.