- Overview
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An honest and unadorned meditation on 30 years of country life
- Book Intro
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A dream of country life. Let’s listen to poet Jin Shin’s story of how to live a country life. Like a compass, his tale will guide people who feel lost and disoriented with everyday cares and concerns. <Becoming a Country Fellow> goes beyond the limits of other books that speak of returning to farm and country life, which tend to focus on foreign cases and deal only with functional and fragmentary sides of farming and country life. Jin Shin’s life is a great achievement of a free individual who did not side either with conservatism or radicalism, conformity or resistance. Professor Jin Shin plainly and honestly meditates on his life. Sweating and bearing ordinary conflicts with neighbors, professor Shin has endlessly asked the question “what is a righteous life of a human being in the universe?” and sought its answer. In this book, which crystalizes Shin’s 30 years of country life, readers will discover his meditation on what life really is. To compose a poem about country lives, to look back to ancestors’ wisdom, to learn from animals and plants in the natural world about the finitude and infinitude of human existence, these are the secrets of a happy country life that Shin shares after 30 years on the farm. The saying “what others have is mine” also means “what I have is other’s.” This book consists of three parts: 1) Attitude for Country Life and Farming; 2) Living Together with Animals and Plants; and 3) Becoming a Country Fellow, Becoming a Human. The author, Jin Shin humbly calls himself an amateur farmer, yet this book shows the depth of his philosophy of everyday life and farming, which has been honed over three decades.
- About the Author
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Shin, Jin
Jin Shin was born in Bumcheon-dong, Busan. He was the recommended poet of the monthly periodical Poetry from 1974 to 1976. Shin taught Korean literature and creative writing at Donga University from 1981 to 2016. He has published 8 collections of poems, including , and 9 volumes of literary criticism, including . Shin is also the author of the children’s story, . Since 1987, he has lived in the countryside near mountains and rivers, and led an amateur farmer’s life. He is the awardee of many literary prizes, including the Poetry Literature Prize, the Bongsaeng Cultural Prize and the Busan City Cultural Prize.
