Department of German Education
2000068009 Choi, Eun-Chong

"Could it be true love?"
If we did a mistake and learned from it, it must be not a mistake but cherish experience of our life for which could not be bought even to pay a lot of money.  If so, as Winston Churchill said, it might be better to commit such errors as early as possible. And then we would not make such a mistake again and learn how to escape it, however it is "the life" that doesn't always turn out the way we planned.

I loved a man long time ago when I didn't know properly what love is. I saw the world through his eyes and felt vexed secretly that he might be disappointed with or dislike what I did. While doing so, my own color was getting lost and it was hard for me to make a decision by myself whatever it was. Finally I was enveloped in despair as if I had lost all my world whenlove was suddenly gone one day.

There is a peom,『After Having Lost Love, I Write』of Gi, Hyung-Do's poetry. After having lost love, I was just absorbed in writing for some time.It was the energy of writing that encouraged me to cross the time without mischance. Now all over. Fortunately then I was not eighteen like Joyce Maynard.

Joyce Maynard is a popular American writer in the field of mass communication, publishing the first book,『Looking Back』in The New York Times at eighteen. I sometimes imagine how would her life change unless she didn't meet J.D. Salinger at eighteen. Salinger is a famous writer that wrote『The Catcher in the Rye』which has become a must book for everyone in the world. As soon as compositions and pictures of Joyce Maynard attending Yale University was carried in a newspaper, she got fan letters form all over the country. There was a letter from Salinger which she unintentionally opened one of them. She who wanted to attain fame as a writer and was accustomed by her parents like that was fascinated in a jiffy by him who was thirty five years older than she. They were keeping in touch with each other by letter and then became to fall into the emotion that they believed it must be love.

She soon dropped out of university and began to live with him who secluded himself from the world. When she gave up all the things and went to his place, he said like this stroking her hair. "Waiting was felt as if it had been eternal, my love."

After that she lived a life to isolate herself not by her own will, but by his which was a quiet life in seclusion. She also didn't recognize the danger to become a totally different person from her original identity in order to gain 'his' love like other women.

Could they be happy so? The love that hd been started at eighteen was over when she was nineteen. Parting was an unilateral declaration that he made. She had to suffer from anorexia and mental depression because of losing her world. As time goes by, she met another man and got married him and delivered a baby and got divorced.

When her daughter became the age of eighteen which she had met Salinger, she began to write an autography in order to get over the pain, to cure her own life. The story involved with an important figure, Salinger stimulated many people's curiosity and especially his fans burnt with indignation.< Nevertheless more people were falling into and moved by her story.  It was genuinely honest and painful.  Though there were so many things to motivate her, the main motivation to write the story of her own life is that she got to know by chance that Salinger were keeping in touch with other women and had relationship with them after having broken up with her. 

Now it doesn't matter what he was at all.He's just significant in two points that 'he' was a woman's first love and had a large influence on a woman's life. 'She' overcame the days' scars splendidly though it had been hard. By the way she defended her virginity during a year which they had lived together. No one knew it was a sort of an allusion and a presage concerning their relationship. After love pass away, there something happen suddenly that you want to do in life except loving someone and a time we solitarily ask ourselves back like this, looking back upon the past,

" Could it be true love?"