By Lee Chang-kook

For the first time in a long while, one day last week I went to downtown Seoul and dropped in at the Kyobo Book Center. Walking to the place after getting off the subway train at City Hall I got confused by the sea-change that has been made to the city during that time.

I realized with disbelief that more than five years have passed since I last visited Kyobo. How fast time flies indeed!

The purpose of my going to the bookstore was to buy an English novel, ``Lady Chatterley's Lover,'' by D. H. Lawrence: the notoriously famous novel, published privately by the novelist himself in 1928.

It was officially banned after publication for more than 30 years in England and in the United States as obscene and pornographic material until in 1959. During the legal ban pirated and expurgated editions of the novel were circulated widely.

Why on earth then, among so many good and famous novels, are you after ``Lady Chatterley's Lover,'' condemned to be so obscene, erotic, and even pornographic? Why on earth are you, a 70-year-old man, bothering yourself to read it now? Are you crazy or something? You may well wonder and ask.

Weeks ago I had a leisurely conversation over a cup of coffee with a lady friend of mine. Her major in college and graduate school was, like mine, English literature, and the topic of the conversation of the day drifted casually onto D. H. Lawrence's ``Lady Chatterley's Lover.''

Far from being abashed she said triumphantly that she had read it long ago with great pleasure and appreciation. She even said that it was so beautiful to her. I was mildly shocked by her boldness and frankness.

I had seen the movie version of it long ago and the video series of it quite recently. Definitely it was not such a laudable thing. Has age blunted the fine sense and sensibility of shame in this woman? I wondered.

The problem was I had not read the novel myself. I was always curious about it but could not bring myself to read it. To be more frank, I have avoided reading it because I was afraid of it.

I thought vaguely that it was a sexually dirty and dangerous book that could corrupt and mislead a young man into evil and hell by showing what he should not see.

Now I am 70 and I myself am a dirty old man seeking sensual pleasure with little sense of shame, guilt or repentance. I am ready to go to hell. I decided to read and enjoy it.

The bookstore, which I frequented once so often, perhaps once a week on average, and therefore, was so familiar to me, has changed so much during the time that I felt as if I had landed on the moon. The atmosphere of the place had become outlandish and strange to me.

Everything was different from that which I had known and seen. Once it was a cozy and quiet place. Now it has become like a huge and luxurious department store. More than anything else it was crowded with so many strangers.

I fell into some reflective thoughts for a moment. We happen to have some dear places in our life, such as a coffee shop, a bookstore, or a park. We frequent them and feel so easy and comfortable with them. Unwittingly they become a part of our life.

But in time we cease to go there gradually and we forget them entirely. Later we find that they still live in our memory. We recollect them once in a while with nostalgia.

I entered the foreign book section of the bookstore. As ever before all the imported books looked so beautiful with their attractive cover designs, various sizes and thickness, and with the challenging titles. My heart leapt once again as it used to do before.

But it was not the same place as it used to be. Most of the people I used to meet there were my colleagues who did the same work in colleges and universities. Now I could not see any old faces there.

They all seemed to have ceased to come here. Yes, all of them are retired from work by now and there was no reason for them to be here anymore. One generation passed away and another generation has come. I have lost my generation.

I made a leisurely tour of the bookstore recollecting the days when I was young and full of energy and ambition. There were so many books on English literature as ever and most of the titles and authors were familiar to me.

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Hardy and Dickens to name just a few. I felt as if I had met all of my old good friends unexpectedly there and felt like touching and embracing them all one by one.

Momentarily I felt a strong urge to buy some of them once again and fill my bookshelves at my study that has become almost empty and deserted since my retirement. But I suppressed the impulse hastily by saying to myself that this was not the time to buy books.

To my great delight a new edition of ``Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was peeping out at me among so many beautiful books. I bought it and went home. I finished reading it within a week.

Now I am thinking of a lunch appointment with my lady friend sooner or later to discuss this novel in detail. I think I have much to talk about this time. We pay lip service to the idea that we learn from reading novels and that they have life lessons to teach us. Right.

D. H. Lawrence delivers a lot in this novel other than sex, but the bargain I had struck in the course of reading with this fiction was a hard one. Reading ``Lady Chatterley's Lover" was a unique pleasure as well as work for me.

I finished reading the novel even wondering if it was worth the trouble at all at my age. One thing was clear: I was lucky that I was not tempted into reading this novel in my adolescence.

Lee Chang-kook is an professor emeritus of English at Chung-Ang University. He can be reached at cklee@cau.ac.kr.