This is, in truth, the kind of prose I find myself reaching for—a synthesis of the formal and the conversational, the classical and the contemporary, where aesthetic sensibility and scientific thought are not held apart but made to speak to one another. And yet, I must admit, it rarely comes quickly; such writing tends to demand more time than one would like to give it.
다른 언어로 읽고 쓰면 문화권에 내장된 원칙에 따라 나의 자아도 바뀌어 글이 느낌이 달라진다. 동아시아어로는 유럽어만큼의 귀여움을 낼 수가 없고 유럽어 모드로 바뀌면 왠지 더 시크하게 프로페셔널한 느낌이 되는데, 어떤 언어가 되었든 나 자신이 너무 묻어난 내 글을 나 스스로 너무 혐오한다. 정확히 말하면 나의 파편과 조우하는 것을 부끄러워하는지도 모르겠다. 그렇지만 가끔 헬렐레 미쳐서 포스팅을 하게 되고.. 내가 정말로 쓰고 싶은 문어체와 구어체, 고전과 현대, 미학과 과학이 융합된 글은 이런 글이다. 한국어는 뭔가 말하듯이 주욱 쓸 수 있는데 영어는 트레이닝의 영향 때문인지 검토가 습관이라 늘 시간이 많이 걸린다.
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There is, in the modern imagination, a quiet quarterbacking of the self—an invisible play-calling that happens far from the stadium lights, somewhere between the gut and the mind. One eats, one thinks, one assumes causality runs upward, from brain to body, intention to action. But there’s a catch—always a catch—not the well-worn paradox of Catch-22(1961) by Joseph Heller, but something subtler, more insidious: the system has been calling its own plays all along. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who, indeed, governs the governors, when the governors are microbial, multitudinous, and metabolically chatty?
To attend to the microbiome, then, is not a wellness trend so much as a reorientation of authorship. The narrative voice fractures. You are no longer the singular “I” drafting your day, but a consortium, a low-key collective—part Roman senate, part Discord server—negotiating mood, focus, even desire. Some mornings feel locked in, laser-focused, main-character energy. Others drift—thoughts branching, recombining, a kind of cognitive jazz. And the suspicion begins to form, almost embarrassingly obvious in retrospect: this isn’t random. This is ecology performing cognition. To dismiss this as mere fad or biohacking noise is, frankly, an obnoxious ad hominem masquerading as critique, one that ignores a growing body of literature on microbial metabolites, neuroinflammation, and synaptic plasticity.
In such a frame, diet sheds its moral overtones—clean versus indulgent, disciplined versus fallen—and reveals itself as architecture. Fibers become scaffolding, ferments become emissaries, polyphenols a kind of chemical rhetoric whispered to bacterial intermediaries who, in turn, annotate your neural text. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing—not clarity, not creativity, not even the illusion of control. And somewhere in that recursive loop, between the bite and the thought, the self is no longer a fixed narrator but a process—adaptive, porous, and, if we’re being honest, in a whisper of a way.