शैडोइंग अभ्यास: The Terrible Price of Not Choosing Yourself - The Philosophy of Osamu Dazai - YouTube के साथ अंग्रेजी बोलना सीखें
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No Longer Human is arguably one of the starkest and most accurate depictions of loneliness, despair, social anxiety, and self-destruction that has ever been written.
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It puts you inside these states, evoking a disturbing disquiet, not through chaos, graphicness, or violence, but a kind of mundanity.
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an immense heightened awareness of simple thought and human activity.
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In placing you so deeply inside the head of a character, it almost becomes difficult to see a clear humanity anymore.
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What becomes clear, however, is the often immense distance between who we are and how we act in the world,
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how we are compelled to both portray and hide ourselves in a society whose patience and tolerance is extremely thin.
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The book, originally titled Disqualified as a Human Being, was written by Japanese author Osamu Dazai.
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It was his last novel, published in 1948, the same year he died, making the title eerily imbued with a second meaning.
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Dazai is widely regarded as one of the most influential and prominent Japanese authors in history, and no longer human is considered a classic of Japanese literature.
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The book's dark themes and the main character's troubling experiences are only further deepened
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and made more disturbing by the fact that the work is semi-autobiographical, ultimately exploring a semi-fictionalized version of the confessions of Dazai himself.
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Within the novel, through a series of notebooks, we follow a young man named Oba Yozo as he recounts different periods of his life,
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the voice and structure carrying a confessional diary-like tone.
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Immediately, it is revealed that Yozo feels fundamentally different and disconnected from humanity.
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At an early age, he can't seem to understand people.
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He finds what they do and care about utterly boring, strange, or terrifying.
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There seems to be no functional bridge between himself and others.
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Fittingly, the first notebook begins with Yozo not understanding what a literal bridge is for
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and why humanity would ever bother constructing one.
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He writes, I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another.
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I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch
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and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground.
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I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge.
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I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways.
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When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
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Yozo's early detachment from a normal orientation of the world is so severe, he doesn't even understand the sensation of hunger.
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He doesn't get why people want to eat.
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Desire itself, in the most literal sense, is strange and almost grotesque to him.
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Of course, he consumes food, but the primary reason for why he does is devastating.
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A representation of what is to come throughout the rest of his life.
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He eats in order to please others, to act human.
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He writes,
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my tastes.
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When I hated something, I could not pronounce the words, I don't like it.
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Throughout adolescence, Yozo goes to extreme lengths to please others and appear like a normal human.
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He creates an entire persona in order to do so, ultimately building a bridge between himself and the world out of the remains of his own self-sacrifice.
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He assumes the persona of a jester, always joking and acting with humor, not because he enjoys humor, but because if he can make people laugh,
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they will let him in without ever having to know or question him.
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It's a kind of Trojan horse into humanity, only he never gets out of the structure.
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He perpetually hides inside.
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He writes, As a child, I had absolutely no notion of what others, even members of my own family, might be suffering or what they were thinking.
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I was aware only of my own unspeakable fears and embarrassments.
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Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown, a child who never spoke a single truthful word.
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Yozo recognizes that humanity and society function on a kind of exchange of mutual deceit.
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And so, like eating, he participates out of necessity, for survival.
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But this only further takes him from himself.
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He writes, I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind,
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of people deceiving one another without, strangely enough, any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware that they are deceiving one another.
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But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception.
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I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live,
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purely, happily, serenely, while engaged in deceit." By adulthood, Yozo's mask has begun to calcify onto his face.
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He is no longer just playing a character, he's sort of become stuck to one.
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The unique perspectives and interests he experienced as a young boy, the joy and kind of wisdom of seeing a world for itself,
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comprised of objects from which their amusements were derived from his personal relationship with and interpretations of them.
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This all becomes diluted, then dissolved.
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This loss inflames a depression and anxiety.
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The world, including himself, has receded into impossibility.
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Soon, all Yozo's interactions, any praise he receives, any alleviations of guilt, any flaws or faults, his relationships, and so on,
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become filtered through a false self.
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There is almost no person left to feel, to possess any ownership over experience or achievement, fault or flaw.
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Though glimmers of a self still occasionally show in brief moments of artistic engagement,
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intoxication or love, they are short-lived and quickly recede into the blackness of the unconscious.
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Ultimately, what Yozo fears about life, about being rejected and never understood, about humanity being a strange and dreadful species, becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
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In fearing rejection, he constantly modifies himself to fit the world.
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In constantly modifying and hiding himself, he ultimately rejects himself, never allowing himself out or the world in.
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In fearing being known, he becomes unknowable.
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In needing to be accepted, he becomes no one.
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What is left is a kind of spiraling of self-denial and self-destruction, where all motion in his life is fueled by the combustion of psychological debris.
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Alienation and self-destruction spread out from the inside, finding their way into his hands as they grab at bottles of alcohol and drugs.
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Yozo's world becomes reflective of his unaddressed inner turmoil.
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The pressure and effort of maintaining a functional self
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that isn't made of anything he understands or cares about becomes so heavy the surface begins to crack, revealing not a truer self, but a nebulous chaos.
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In the end, he is removed from society and placed in a mental institution.
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From one madhouse to another.
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It is a reasonable interpretation to see this story as a call to authenticity.
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In many ways, that is a sound interpretation and a useful lesson to pull from it.
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We must be and express ourselves in every moment in which it's appropriate, and we must strive to confront and understand ourselves as honestly as we can.
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We must live with the kind of courage to be rejected, to be misunderstood, to be disliked.
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Otherwise we risk losing our sense of self completely.
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We risk never really being known by anyone at all.
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we risk losing control and orientation in life, drifting into patterns of aimlessness or destruction.
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Your worst sin, wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
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But it's more complicated than that, and the truth is more devastating.
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Firstly, it isn't obvious how much forthrightness is appropriate across various moments and contexts of life and society.
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Yozo isn't wrong to notice that there's a kind of functional, positive deceit intrinsic to human interactions.
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And he isn't wrong to form and operate through a functional persona in the world.
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We all do this, at least on some level.
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We present a self to the world that differs from our so-called authentic self, and we present different selves in different contexts.
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And the balance of authenticity versus pretense isn't always obvious.
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We are prone to miss the mark often and meaningfully, especially if we find ourselves sharing anything like the perspective, awareness, or personal divergence of Yozo.
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Yozo's problem isn't that he's wrong about how the world is.
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It's that, in many ways, he's right.
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And the gap between his assessments of the world and his true self seems, at least to him, unbridgeable.
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And he's hyper-aware of this gap, of himself and his relation to an absurd world.
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His problem is found in that he wants to bridge this gap, but can't.
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At least not authentically and functionally.
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It's one or the other, or perhaps neither.
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If we return to the opening of the first notebook, Yozo was a young boy confused about a world and a self he had no say in.
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Mine has been a life of much shame," he writes as the opening line.
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This shame indicates a desire to be right, to fit in, to be good, to be normal.
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But he can't.
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That is the shame and the tragedy.
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He can't be himself and be functional in society.
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For whatever reason, he is the way he is.
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And so what is he supposed to do?
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Be himself in a world that will ostracize him?
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Enjoy his self-alienation productively and happily?
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At the end of the novel, in the epilogue, the perspective shifts.
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It is no longer Yozo's narration.
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It is the perspective of an individual who appears to be some sort of writer, who has come into possession of Yozo's notebooks.
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He's obtained them from a barkeeper of a bar Yozo had previously frequented.
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After reading the notebooks, the individual asks the barkeeper about her reaction when she read them.
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Did you cry?
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She responds, no, I didn't cry.
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I I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything.
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This is perhaps the most tragic part.
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Yozo was caught in a loop that he never had a real chance of escaping from.
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And in the end, society doesn't really care or offer him any help.
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Society doesn't tend to those who struggle to understand, engage with, or produce value for it.
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Even close friends and family members of individuals can, and often do, receive their love and attention from those who no longer meet a baseline measure of functionality or productive value.
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even if, and sometimes especially if, the individual is hamstrung with depression, anxiety, or addiction.
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The yozos of the world are often left alone in their head, with an unstable bridge, with little to no footprints on its surface.
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As previously mentioned, the book is widely regarded as a semi-autobiographical recounting of Dazai's actual life and experience.
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This makes it all the more devastating, but in a way, it also makes it all the more beautiful.
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Dazai struggled throughout his life to understand and be understood by humanity.
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But through his work, he ultimately built his bridge.
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One that is not only sturdy, but profound, and ironically, useful.
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A unique and beautifully constructed bridge that offers transport into a realm of the human psyche so many of us experience firsthand,
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but have very rarely been invited in to see or discuss it plainly with others.
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Through art and literature, Dasei found a way out of his head and into the world, and he found a way to let the world in.
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If only he hadn't exited life when he did, perhaps he could have seen more plainly how much his own experience was shared, how much his work helped others,
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and how much the world truly knew him.
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As put in the introduction of a translation of the book by Donald Keane, No longer human is not a cheerful book,
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yet its effect is far from that of a painful wound gratuitously inflicted on the reader.
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As a reviewer wrote of Dasei's earlier novel, Such is the power of art to transfigure what is objectively ignoble or depraved,
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that is actually deeply moving and even inspiriting.
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To know the nature of despair and to triumph over it in the ways that are possible to oneself, imagination was Dasei's only weapon, as surely a sort of grace.
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In the end, Dasei offers something, ironically, far more human than we are used to, an honest communion with the absurdity of our relationship with ourselves and the world,
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a relationship that is often insurmountable or tragic, but nonetheless deeply common and real.
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The book ends with the barkeeper saying, It's his father's fault.
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The Yoza we knew was so easygoing and amusing.
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And if only he hadn't drunk.
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No, even though he did drink.
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He was a good boy.
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An angel.
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Here we see that Yoza wasn't even perceived as being particularly weird or negative by the people who knew him.
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In this final blow, Dazai seems to want to show us that, the most tormented among us, those who feel a strangeness of being with immense intensity,
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can and often do, go their whole lives without this suffering ever being known, without it ever being properly understood, without them ever being understood.
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Your father, your partner, your closest friend, you, how similar and in what ways are we to Yozo?
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So much of who we are is hidden, to the world and to ourselves.
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We have done so much to fit in, to be liked, to be human.
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For many of us, it isn't clear what is left.
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But it is up to each of us to find out what is, and to share it while we still can.
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Some of the most important books we could ever read in life are books we might not ever discover.
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The key is not merely to read more books, but to read better books and to engage in the ones we love more effectively.
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आप "The Terrible Price of Not Choosing Yourself - The Philosophy of Osamu Dazai" के साथ Shadowing तकनीक का उपयोग करके अपनी अंग्रेजी का अभ्यास कर रहे हैं।
शैडोइंग तकनीक क्या है?
शैडोइंग (Shadowing) एक विज्ञान-समर्थित भाषा सीखने की तकनीक है जो मूल रूप से पेशेवर दुभाषिया प्रशिक्षण के लिए विकसित की गई थी। विधि सरल लेकिन शक्तिशाली है: आप मूल अंग्रेज़ी ऑडियो सुनते हैं और तुरंत इसे ज़ोर से दोहराते हैं — जैसे वक्ता की छाया 1-2 सेकंड की देरी से। शोध से पता चलता है कि यह उच्चारण सटीकता, स्वर, लय, जुड़ी हुई ध्वनियाँ, सुनने की समझ और बोलने की प्रवाहशीलता में काफ़ी सुधार करता है।