By Lee Chang-kook

As a long and faithful reader and subscriber of two internationally famous weekly news magazines, ``Time'' and ``Newsweek'', I find myself having become somewhat critical and choosy about reading them recently.

For example, I rarely read the cover stories. They are too long to begin with, and usually deal with topics that are too heavy and serious. I know some of these feature stories are really good, but I also know many of them are planned and written competitively with a view for increasing the circulation of the magazines.

Therefore, I try to skip the cover stories as much as possible. Instead I prefer short, simple and light articles. That is the reason why I came to read the magazines backward these days. Whenever a new edition is delivered to me, I reverse it and open the last page first and leaf through it looking at titles and photos before I land on an attractive article to read.

Often, I do not find any article worth reading throughout the entire issue and these unread numbers pile up on my desk. But I don't care or mind. Magazines are magazines no more, I mutter to myself.

I have acquired this rather impertinent attitude toward the two magazines after having lived with them for more than 40 years. I have to admit with some regret that the passion I had had for them over such a long period of time has significantly waned and subsided by now. Still I receive the two magazines every week through annual subscription, but with no more enthusiasm than when I welcome my old wife from her usual daily outings. Secretly, I lament over this change of mind, but I cannot help it.

Of course I was not like this before. The two magazines were always more than mere magazines for me. To read them was a sacred ritual of the week. The cover stories were a weekly delight, expectation and obligation. All the articles in them, short or long, seemed very important and I tried not to miss any of them. I felt very proud of the fact that I belonged to the intellectual elites in Korea who could read these English magazines.

It all started with vanity as well as practicality when I entered college. As an English major who did not have any other or better English texts available, the two magazines provided me with what I needed. Being displayed side by side every week in a corner of the bookstore, the two magazines, like twin brothers or sisters, called and beckoned me. It was a pleasure and pride for me just to pick up one and leaf through it. I wanted to be seen always with either of them in my hand, wherever I was.

Often vanity and practicality go hand in hand and complement each other. At first I bought one of them, and as time went on and my financial circumstances improved, I began to buy both of them. Then I subscribed to the two magazines annually. To have been able to receive and read the two magazines every week for the last 30 or more years through subscription without any disconnection, intermission or severance was a silent testimony to my monotonous but happy, peaceful and successful life. In fact, I grew up intellectually, professionally and financially with the two magazines.

With the two new magazines on my desk every week, I became a professor of English, taught English literature at a university for three decades and retired. During that time, my English improved so much that I could successfully conduct my English poetry class in English. As far as English was concerned, I felt as if I had stood at the top of Mt. Everest looking at the valleys far down below with a smile. It was a long journey and all the way through the two magazines were good and faithful companions for me. I could not be too grateful to them.

But now I find I have become a very ungrateful and egoistic old man. I began to feel that reading two magazines a week has become a burden and I feel like unloading it. My advanced age, weakening eyesight, tight budget and decreasing interest in world affairs, and more than anything else, the unread editions piling up on my desk every week ― all these unpropitious phenomena are telling me ceaselessly to think twice before I renew the next annual subscription to the two magazines. And to my own surprise, I find I am quite inclined to do so.

I find old age makes a man cold, capricious and even cruel. Now I am at the point of making a great decision in my life. One of the two magazines must leave me. Once I thought of dropping both of them all at once, but I relented in the fury to do so, and decided to be as reasonable and generous as I can be by reprieving one of the two. Either ``Newsweek'' or ``Time'' must go by next month. I find it is not an easy to job to do. Like my twin daughters, I cannot think of one without the other. The two have become one entity, and I cannot separate one from the other.

Nobody around me would even notice the departure of one magazine from me, and my life would not be much different from what it is now. But I know my life has shrunk a little bit more. Yes, my life has already shrunk from what it was. As trees shed their leaves in autumn, I have already lost many of my cherished things.

My parents, all of the relatives of my parents' age, most of my old teachers, some of my dear friends, all have already left me. I am becoming smaller and smaller day-by-day. I feel that I'm being left alone. Like it or not, old life is like jettisoning one dear thing after another before the storm finally sinks the ship.

cklee@cau.ac.kr