Let us forget all the dreams

Among Park Tae-won’s works, there is a novel titled, “Jeokmyeol (complete disappearance through death in English),” which was published in a series in The Dong-A Ilbo in 1930. In the novel, there is a phrase, “Life is a dream. And what life pursues is also a dream.” Park Tae-won already knew it 90 years ago that life heads toward a dream and is made up of dreams. It seems what forms the basis of life is a solid reality. But an important part of life is a dream, which has no substance. We cannot live the day without dreaming. Without dreams, we cannot live our life.

A dream we dream every day has been accumulated to make a full year. When December passes, this year will bid farewell and pass by. The year 2021 will never come back again. So let us read this poem. “Let us forget all the dreams” by poet Jeong Yang is a poem about all the dreams we had and all the days we lived. There is no work more suitable than this poem to look back on the year that is made up of dreams. If you do not read this poem in December, when will you?

This year has been tough and harsh for many people. But as babies are born even in battlefields, we have had dreams despite the circumstances. A dream to become better, a dream to achieve what we wanted, and a dream to become the person we wanted to be. Most of those dreams have not come true. But let us not blame ourselves. Let us not resent the dream we had to forget or ourselves for erasing the dream from our mind. We have to forget the dreams we have not realized in 2021 in order to dream again next year. This is the time to forget them well.