# The Shadow That Outlasts the Light / Seven I have come to understand that we are all, in some fundamental way, creatures of shadow. Not in the moral sense—though that too has its claim—but in the ontological sense. We are beings cast by light, yes, but our substance lies in what the light cannot touch. Consider the medieval philosophers who spoke of light as the very principle of being itself. Thomas Aquinas saw in light a metaphor for God's creative power, the way illumination brings things into intelligibility. Yet even they, in their careful geometries of theology, could not dispel a troubling thought: that which casts a shadow must first exist in the absence of light. The shadow is not merely the negation of light. It is the proof that something stands in the way—something real, obdurate, utterly itself. We live between two darknesses. One before, one after. The light that comes is merely an interval, a borrowed radiance. And in this interval, we mistake ourselves for creatures of day. But consider instead the nocturnal animals, those creatures that have made an art of darkness. The owl does not mourn the sun. It has learned the world in another language—the language of echo and intuition, of sensing what cannot be seen directly. There is a wisdom here that daylight creatures rarely possess. The bat, blind, navigates the night with a precision that would shame the eagle at noon. It has not lost vision; it has transformed it into something deeper. We are all bats, if only we would admit it. The greatest philosophers have often been those who understood that clarity is not the highest truth. Lao Tzu spoke of the usefulness of emptiness. Keats celebrated "negative capability"—the ability to exist in uncertainty without reaching for meaning. And Heidegger, that difficult man, insisted that what is most essential often withdraws from direct comprehension. Being, he said, shows itself precisely by concealing itself. The revelation contains within it a hiddenness. There is a shadow that falls across every truth we think we have grasped. This shadow is not an imperfection in our knowledge; it is the mark of reality itself. What is fully illuminated is merely ideology. What is partially hidden, tentatively approached, held in an embrace that dare not clutch too tightly—this is closer to the real. I think of the mystics, those men and women who lived in the margins of religious orthodoxy. They spoke constantly of a light that blinds, a brilliance so intense that it becomes indistinguishable from darkness. Saint John of the Cross called it the "dark night of the soul." In such darkness, he found God more fully than in any theological argument. The absence became the presence. The emptiness became fullness. We have built a civilization on the terror of shadow. We light our streets at night to abolish it. We use logic to illuminate the darkness of the unknown, as though uncertainty were a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited. We are so afraid of what we cannot see that we have made blindness our primary virtue—the blindness of those who stare only at what is brightly lit, never suspecting that the most important things occur in peripheral vision, in the corner of the eye, in what we pretend not to notice. But the shadow grows longer as the day declines. And there will come an evening when the sun will not rise again—not for us, not for this world, perhaps not for the universe itself. What will we know then, we creatures who never learned to see in darkness? What language will we speak when the light fails utterly? I wonder if the old Buddhist monks understood this when they sat in their caves and meditated in absolute darkness. Not as punishment. Not as denial. But as preparation. As the cultivation of an interior luminescence that does not depend on the accident of being near a star. The shadow teaches what light cannot. It teaches humility. It teaches that we are not the measure of things. It teaches that there is vastness we will never comprehend, depths we will never plumb. And strangely, in this teaching, there is a kind of liberation. If we are not masters of the world, then we are free from the terrible burden of having to be. We can rest. We can wait. We can listen to the dark as though it were speaking, and perhaps, if we are very quiet, we will hear what it has been trying to tell us all along. The shadow is not the opposite of light. It is its companion, its counterweight, its secret sharer. Where light goes, shadow must follow. And in the end, when all is dark, the shadow will have had the last word. This is not despair. This is recognition.

 
- Why do you give such short replies to everything I say? Why do you dodge like that? Tell me straight—you're not bothered by me, are you? Just say it once! You have no idea how far I could drift from you! Maybe right now, sitting here with you, it never even occurs to you. From your side, the distance between us is so vast, or maybe this whole connection of ours, maybe you never even want to think about what that distance means. I know it—all these feelings, all these complaints, they're one-sided. This madness is mine alone. I told you I'd leave! I really won't stay anymore. I'm tired too, I'm human! You tell me to go! Just say it once and see if I still stay anyway!
- Why would I lie? I want you to stay. Haven't I said that?
- Why do you want that? For extracting sadistic pleasure? You don't suffer anymore! All the pain—it's all on me, only me!
- Am I a sadist? Are you sure?
- Yes, only about me! Nothing about me touches you! Why? There's no feeling inside you that moves because of me. Tell me right now—would you be happy if I didn't bother you? Ignore me, oneday you are going to miss how much I loved you. You don't read any of my writings! Always the same thing—I'm restless, I behave badly, I'm disrespectful! Don't you see anything else in me beyond that? If you don't, that's your failure! I'm thinking I'll kill myself within a month! My sister will send your money back to you! I don't want to live in this world anymore. It's been enough. I've endured enough. Not anymore! Not anymore!
- You will live, you will laugh, you will rise again...for me, for yourself. You have to do this! It will make me happy to see you alive! It will make all those who love you so happy to see you living well. Do people live only for themselves, tell me?
- Listen, I don't have parents! You know that already! That boy didn't even tell me it was his wedding day! Everything has always been like this for me. I really don't have anyone. People want to live for someone or other. Who would I live for? You know, I haven't taken a single job exam! People less qualified than me are taking exams everywhere! There's no point telling all this to someone for whom nothing about me matters anyway, I know. And yet I'm telling you, I keep telling you. Why I keep saying it, I don't know. I smile only for you—you send me one small text and I hold onto it all day! I can spend hours just on something small from you. I can pass days and days just thinking of you. Have you ever spent time thinking of someone you'll never have? But why am I doing all this? For whom? For someone who wouldn't remember me even by mistake? Or am I doing this for myself? Just because my heart wants to, because I feel better doing it? When these thoughts come to me, I go mad! I hold your feet and tell you, I'm not cheap like all those Facebook girls! I only say 'I love you' if I truly love. Love is precious to me, Shubhra.

# Love is not something to be spoken; it is something to be felt.

I have truly fallen in love with you! Please, push me away! Humiliate me rudely and I will leave! My self-respect is far too great! Please! Think about what I’m saying! I am begging you in such helplessness!

Read my writing! All my life I have given one hundred percent to everyone, yet returned empty-handed! No one understands me! No one! Everyone judges me superficially. Everywhere I am taken for granted.

—

“I respect you deeply. I love you. Don’t misunderstand. I know you are not like any other woman. To tell you this separately means I doubt your capacity to understand. I truly understand what you are like.”

“Don’t you dare desecrate the word ‘love’ by uttering it this way! When someone loves another, it has a word, a gesture… you can see it clearly from a distance! When someone loves another, there is an expression, an urgency, something you feel even without drawing close. Now you will tell me that Neeraj has no capacity to understand or feel! What I am saying is true. Take my own words, for instance. I love you—and however much you try to avoid it, for just two or three seconds you do sense it! Similarly, had you loved me, I would have sensed it. You know, even a complete fool can feel love. But not everyone is born with the fortune to receive love. Had I possessed such fortune, I would have at least received the love of my parents—the ones deemed the most selfless in my solitary world. I never received it. I received nothing in life! Neither love, nor affection, nor attention. Since that never happened, no one else will ever love me. I understood that growing up! Do you know when a person truly matures? Only when they can discern who loves them and who does not. I have matured. Don’t come to teach me what love looks like.

I’m saying, if you block me, I will eventually forget you without seeing you on Facebook! And you must have understood by now, in these three months, that I am not like those other fools who chase BCS exams, chasing after you for personal gain. I brought no selfish motive to you! I didn’t even notice when I fell in love with you! Had I felt it coming, I would never have wanted to burn myself again. I know what burning feels like. But even now, I haven’t learned to catch myself before I catch fire. Let me tell you a secret thought—even my own sister doesn’t know this—I am seriously going to commit suicide! And let me tell you of another torment: only your warm tenderness, no doctor, can restore me to a normal life! You once did suicide prevention counseling. You saved seventy-four people from death, brought them back to normal living. Did any of them love you, or fall in love with you? When you love someone, does it make you want to die? Or does loving someone take away the desire to die? I love you! I am dying—will you not save me? Is it that you no longer wish to save anyone from suicide? Are you exhausted? Or merely annoyed?

An emotional bond between us can never exist in any form! Because we are people from two different worlds! You have something pulling you back—you have a life! I have a life, but nothing pulling me back! Have you seen the film *Drishti?*

# My Sorrows, Like a Tortoise

My sorrows are like a tortoise… you and I face each other, singing the song of silence! Why did you come? I was doing fine on my own. In my own way, with my solitude, bearing all the world’s neglect. A human can survive days without food, but once they’ve loved someone, they cannot live a single moment without that love. Why did you come?

—I’ve heard everything, understood everything. Let me say again: in this world, love is not the last word. Peace, and peace alone, is the last word.

—All right, then. I’m granting you peace from my side, forever! Stay blessed! In this life, we shall never meet. I know it. Yet knowing this, I remain so restless. The longing for union cuts deeper than union itself—perhaps that’s why! Life doesn’t give us everything, and even when it does, it takes much away! Why is it so? Life gives us exactly what we need—no more, no less. What we don’t need to live, life refuses to give us. And if it gives, it reclaims. I know all this, I understand it. Yet knowing, understanding it all, why am I still so restless?

A final word:

A university professor once said in class—

To prove whether someone is truly of good character, they must prove their goodness while standing in a bad place!

By that measure, I am deserving of every certificate of character there is. Until now, no one has come close to matching me.

Similarly, it must be said: only those who have lived through extreme mental anguish, day after day, can truly taste mental peace. To know what a moment of peace feels like, even amid such profound suffering—I alone know that taste well. Jibanananda Das was called the poet of solitude because fortune itself deceived him at every turn. He distanced himself from the entire world, chose a solitary life for himself. He found peace for only forty-eight hours—with a dancer, as research suggests (or so I’ve learned). Whether that research is right or wrong, I won’t judge. But if Jibanananda truly found peace with a dancer, then those moments of peace were his life’s greatest treasure. Where comfort or peace comes from—that is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that it comes. Even if it doesn’t come from family, but from somewhere beyond it, then that place becomes home. Not the people of the family, but the people of that place become one’s own. Whoever gives us peace, whether they are family or not, is more intimate than intimacy itself. At day’s end, if we find peace, we are at peace. If we suffer, it is we who must weep. There’s no point remembering others. If we live in torment, no one else suffers it. What does it matter to family members if my own life crumbles in pain? Those hypocrites who dissect Jibanananda’s character, asking why he found peace with a dancer—I want to shoot them dead. When that man suffered day after day, where were those swine?

Once, for speaking the truth, all the activist boys at university ganged up and mentally harassed me. Some of them went to my social media, spread obscene pictures of me, spoke filth about sex! My crime was this: I’d said in front of a news channel, “Let the protests end and classes begin!” At that moment, I had no one beside me except two or three friends and a teacher.

They even threatened to kill me! In this country, when you speak the truth, you stand alone—yet plenty are eager to savour the sweet fruit of that truth once it’s borne. When I realized that those I’d lived with like family for seven years, studied alongside, learned from—that those very people had set boys upon me, I thought: what kind of shelter had I built with such people all these years?

You won’t say it, but you think me inhuman, uncouth, and God knows what else! After the movement ended, I was told: lodge complaints against those who mentally harassed you; their studentship will be revoked. I said no. I needed to know them. And I did know them. I harbour no complaints against them. People reveal themselves in hard times. You come to understand who stands with you and who stands against you. Time alone teaches all truths. I have glimpsed the true faces of certain people. That is my greatest reward. I need nothing more. Before hardship arrives, no one can truly say who is friend and who is foe. We all wear masks; to see the person beneath, you must pass through darkness yourself. I was fortunate—young as I am, I’ve already seen the truth within many.

I tell you this so you might understand: what befalls many in their lives is merely a fraction of what has befallen mine. Today, through your words, I see clearly—you see nothing good in me. It’s not your fault. On Facebook we witness such falsehood daily that truth escapes our sight entirely. Accepting every accusation, speaking with a calm mind: you will never see me again in this life. Not on Facebook, not anywhere. Bye, my memories in November.

—Good night. There’s no need to carry such anger. Life is beautiful. You will understand in time. Beautiful days await you. Walk toward them slowly, with a gentle heart. Sleep now.

—You are left forever. You don’t know anything about me. You only know what I have decided to let you know. You will never ever be disturbed by me again. Just one thing to say…you will never know what you have lost. You have just lost an eternal love…If God exists, someday He will answer it. Best wishes for you. Bye forever! A ‘beyadob’ does not deserve these greetings such as: Shuvo sokal, dupur, bikel, sondha, ratri…Hope your life will be surrounded by lots of so-called civilized persons in this year. You will never ever be disturbed by this beyadob…I will never open the window of my room again to see the sky. A whole life will pass without ever seeing it. Take care of yourself. Bye forever. I might not make you understand what I feel inside myself for you. Be happy wherever you are. Day after day I was getting mentally attached with you…I need to be detached from you…otherwise it will make me suffer extremely in the long run. I will be waiting for hearing your voice after death. Death will help us meet together. Take care of yourself.

DON’T leave me in the afterlife.

The starkest, purest, most crystalline truth of this world is this—that she who bore you in her womb can push you away, misunderstand you, and that everyone else doing the same, hurting you, getting you wrong…is perfectly natural!

— Good morning.
— Everything about me is bad. Stay away from me. Not a single message will ever go from my phone to yours again! I’m bad bad bad! Clear? Listen! Even rapists have looked into my innocent eyes and let me go! Those who couldn’t read these eyes—they don’t have eyes fine enough to see the subtle mathematics of a life! I have the courage to shout this truth aloud! Whoever couldn’t write a single line about Nirja hasn’t grasped the very soul of literature! That street boy who scored the lowest in his exams—he’s the one who pulled me back from a suicide attempt! He’s a man who scored far higher marks than many in the real examination of life! What do I even say to whom…someone who casually says such things—had you been unemployed or average, you’d have thought about me! Where would I find that kind of time! Even great doctors at Basundhara have thought about Nirja! Held her to their chests! University professors have thought about her! A lady professor came rushing from afar even while carrying ten months of pregnancy in her belly, just to console Nirja! The Dean sat sleepless through the night beside an ailing Nirja, a guardian in vigil. He wouldn’t let ten important people into the room, but he sat Nirja beside him and fed her sweets on her birthday! I too can be loved; I too have received people’s selfless love in life.

All these people are busy! None of them are average! But they’ve all transcended rules and superficial things to recognize one pure truth! That truth which is immaculate, untainted! Eyes that saw even a street harasser ask for forgiveness—Nirja lives with such eyes! And for whoever finds these eyes bad-tempered, inhuman, impertinent…they should read Freud’s psychoanalysis very carefully! Ugh! What do I say to whom! Sorry, your life philosophy and mine aren’t the same! Because we’ve both seen life differently! The truth is, as long as every person isn’t harming anyone else, they’re right in their own place, because each person has seen life through different eyes. Not everyone’s experience is the same. What everyone wants from life and what they get isn’t the same either. So naturally, everyone’s philosophy of life won’t be the same—and that’s how it should be, and that’s beautiful.

Instead of wasting all this time writing you long messages, I should have slept properly and my body would have been better! We understand our mistakes only after we’ve made them. And I want to tell you seriously—from today onwards, that old weakness I felt for you has diminished greatly! I’m angry at myself. Why did I love you! You see, sir, I was hallucinating! Otherwise who has the audacity to go to a temple and offer their life to someone else! I could do it! A complete fool, that’s what I am! I’ll never want to give my life to anyone again. You’re right—one should love oneself!

Anyway, I haven’t slept for 75 days! Now I’ll sleep properly! Bye…Memories in November! Oh, and since I’m saying ‘Memories in November,’ don’t misinterpret it again! You’ll remain my ‘Babu’ like Ornob to me…who will never be replaced, whose absence will hurt me silently.

— Yes. I’m the bad one. A person who scored zero in life’s examination. I’m fine with myself being the way I am. I don’t need anyone’s certificate. I don’t give anyone certificates, nor do I need anyone’s. Who do we even know, any of us!

What’s the need for all this analysis and explanation?
– Good morning! May your day be well. We all speak, but no one truly listens to anyone! We keep talking about ourselves, waiting—hoping—that the person beside us will actually hear us. Not just with their ears, but with their heart too. Yet we ourselves never listen to their words in that way. We miss so much truth, so much beauty, simply because we never learned to listen. We’ve only learned to speak, to make ourselves heard. The thought that listening is also required—it barely registers in our minds. We want everyone to hear us out, yet we refuse to hear anyone else out.

I was just reading about this in science—how a scorching summer road, tar-black under the relentless sun, appears wet and gleaming, just like after rain, because of total internal reflection! I think human life is much the same. What we see from the surface isn’t always true. There may be something hard and bitter hidden beneath. We don’t bother searching for it. We don’t even truly wish to know the truth about those closest to us. About anyone, we want to know only as much as helps us think of them the way we’ve already decided to think. We lack the moral integrity to bear truth.

You’re genuinely so annoyed with me! I realized it when I saw a thousand likes on your status (not love, peace is greater—though I’m not sure if it was for me). Everyone has the ability to make someone happy. One can do it by entering the room while the other can do it by leaving the room. It is as simple as that! I’ll walk away from you and give you your peace of mind! Happy now? If someday, like waves in a wave theory, a frequency stirs in your heart and my love warms it for just a moment, and a small sigh escapes from there, then that alone will be the fulfillment of my love—no matter how much you blame me for it! I couldn’t make you understand my love. This pitiful failure belongs to me alone. I can only pray for you…May you never have to stagger in a desert in search of water like me who was scuttling in blazing heat for the drops of your love. Dear, you blew a new life into me. But you went away taking the last fragment of my optimism with you, now I am just a breathing entity with no hopes left!

Arundhati Roy said it in The God of Small Things: Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. I broke those love laws and loved someone from whom I could expect nothing but fresh, colorful sorrow! It’s been decided—who will love whom. It’s been decided—who will get whom. It’s been decided—how far one will push another away. It’s been decided—how much love one will give. You are my memories in November. Please don’t love me, never misunderstand me—this pitiful plea is all that remains! I wanted something I gave you to stay with you forever. That’s why I wanted to search the whole wide world and find for you one hundred and eight blue lotus flowers! You didn’t take them. How cruelly you returned them!

# A Blessing and a Confession

Bless me so that after many years I can say—Varuna, there is nothing but the smell of flesh on her breast now—and remembering you, I can burst into laughter years from now and say, what madness I committed for her once!

Today, will you read what I’ve written—read it a few times, feeling it completely with your heart? Thus, Arnab! (whom you never came to know.)

—Good morning! I’ve read what you wrote. You always write so well. How are you?

—One day Ruby Roy will truly say, I’ve seen you somewhere! She will, I’m sure! Wait for it, you must hear this! Stay blessed.

Let me tell you a story. What do you say?

A girl suddenly messaged me one day. Her words struck me as strange! Nobody talks like that! She wrote—*Didi, I love you! I see you every day at university! You look like one of Tagore’s creations! When I see you, I can see my Tagore…* and much more besides! I was taken aback. I thought, this must be fake. I asked her to send a photo. She sent one of herself, and for some reason, looking at it, it didn’t seem fake anymore. I accepted her request. Every day she’d ask me—have you eaten? What are you doing? How are you?…every single day! I’d say, I’m fine. That’s all.

One day she met me at the university. Because I had little money, most people looked not at my face but at my clothes. No one saw that I was like a wilted flower blooming in a vase—I was that person whose faded garments could not hide the delicate beauty that shone through my entire face. When she came to meet me, I saw she was looking only at my face! Even now, when I wear better clothes, back then the university expenses were so heavy that I lived a genuinely poor life.

I watched the girl carefully. I saw that unlike my other female friends, she wasn’t looking at my clothes. It was a different feeling altogether! Then came acquaintance, conversation. But I never messaged her first. She always took the initiative, always asked about me. I don’t know why I never felt the need to reciprocate.

Perhaps people are jealous creatures…far too much so. One day her messages became shorter. On campus, she began to avoid me. Then I thought, oh, someone has stopped bothering me, stopped asking about me! I checked my messages again and again. I saw—no…she was gone. When we’d pass on campus, she’d just say “how are you” and walk away without stopping. The messages I once set aside carelessly, irritably—I began to crave the warmth of that love. I saw that no one asked anymore…whether I’d eaten, whether I was well. No one looked past the outer shell at my pale, beautiful face, neglected and unloved, with unblinking eyes. She had only said once, I came to you with no selfishness.

I don’t know why my eyes still grow wet for her. Six months have passed since I left that university for good, yet it feels as though I abandoned someone there. I will never find that person again. I killed that person of that time with my own hands! The one I once neglected, and for whose love I still weep today! And there is one more person I can never forget in this life—my Dean. My beloved Dean and that girl…these are what I gained from the university. I am so blessed.

# On Certificates, Indifference, and the Boomerang of the Heart

So many people leave university with nothing but a certificate—no real learning, not even a single friend! But that wasn’t my fate.

She doesn’t ask about me anymore. There was a time when I found her love suffocating; now her indifference won’t let me rest. Life is like wave theory! The heart vibrates at a frequency and releases its longing as a sigh. When someone’s indifference finally brings you peace, understand this: love is smiling behind closed lips, saying—*fool, whom did you leave behind? Your heart, your heart, oh my heart. Your life has gone, you found no peace, oh my heart, my heart…*

Let me share something else with you. How about that?

I knew her circumstances weren’t good. Books cost so much. I’d see her borrowing from others. One day I said, “Listen, if you ever need books, you can ask me! After the semester, I don’t need them anyway.” She replied, “Sister, if I ask you for books, maybe one day you’ll think I love myself only for those books.”

I wept that day hearing her words. Seriously—she never took a single book from me. Yet there are so many others, those comfortable enough to buy books whenever they want, who choose not to spend on them but rather save money for romance—*they* took books from me! I’ve bundled all my books in a basket and kept them away. Sometimes I look at them and think of her. Now nobody bothers me. Nobody checks on me constantly. Nobody sits waiting to bear my irritation. Why does it hurt so when annoying people stop annoying you? I don’t understand. Blast it!

…Isn’t it a beautiful story?

She left because people have pride. I never reached out to her the way she reached out to me. Those long messages of hers—sometimes they irritated me. I thought, I’m her senior! How dare she speak to me like that. But she went on pouring her heart out, unguarded. Truly, nothing survives in this world if neglected.

“But I loved reading those long messages. Why didn’t you?”

“Oh, you loved them so much you suffered mental anguish over them! Wonderful! You’ll see—one day I’ll be gone. Nobody else will send messages like mine. While talking, if I look away, nobody will say it like I did: ‘Hey! Why are you looking away!’ Nobody will!”

Look at me—I found her annoying, so she stopped annoying me, and now *I’m* the one who’s annoyed! That must be the law of this world. The earth returns everything. What you give comes back. It always does. Everyone understands the value—after they’ve left, when it’s too late. Then there’s nothing but to burn in regret.

“I agree. I’ve learned this truth from my own life. I’ll tell you about it someday if I get the chance. And I never suffer anguish reading messages. Please don’t misinterpret me.”

Let me tell you another story. When I was in fourth grade and played with friends, there was this drug-addicted boy who’d follow me around. I was terrified of him. Whenever I saw him, I’d show him my shoe, tell people to beat him if I could. Our home environment was so filthy and harsh then that I stayed outside most of the time—even at night.

# A Dialogue on Language, Love, and Understanding

Because he was drug-addicted, he could have seduced me very easily if he had wanted. But he never said anything to me!
For twelve years like that, he circled around me!
When I finished my honours, I heard he’d gotten married! His wife was very beautiful! They have a son! He works now too! But when I walk past him, I turn back to see if he still looks at me. And truly, he doesn’t! Not at all! Not even a glance! Once I wanted to hit him just for the crime of looking at me! And today, as far as my eyes can see, I watch him, and he truly doesn’t look anymore! Perhaps this is natural justice.
– There are people like that. I’d heard a similar story about someone else once.
– Well then, why do you say I cause you mental anguish? One day you will search for me, but I will not be there to entertain you. Of course, I don’t know if emptiness troubles everyone the same way! Alas, pseudo-human beings fill society far too much! But I am very sensitive…it hurts me! Emptiness troubles me terribly. When the person I love leaves, it pains me, and if they leave misunderstanding me, it hurts even more.
– I’m telling you again, I never had any objection to your message, and I don’t have one now. Don’t misunderstand. Please!
– Then it’s me you object to!
– No, that’s not it either. I have objections to certain ideas and mental positions of yours.
– Foucault had a philosophy, the essence of which is this: language is made by humans. Nothing can ever truly be conveyed through language! It’s all a play of signifiers and the signified! Let me break it down. In this world, there is no such thing as a standard language. We take whichever few languages we consider standard as our measure of acceptability. Our notion of this is entirely imposed. The influence, prestige, and power of those who speak those languages have made them acceptable. It’s such that any language can become acceptable to speakers of another language, if the speakers of the first language are very powerful. Again, it could happen that, say, five hundred people speak an obscure language that no one else in the world knows. If it turns out that these five hundred people never have to depend even slightly on anyone who speaks another language at any point in their lives—from birth to death they depend on no one outside themselves—then they can easily go through birth, growth, death, and everything else in that one native language alone. If everything can be managed through hand or facial gestures without speaking at all, then that suffices. Between the one trying to communicate and the one being communicated to, in any language whatsoever—even if it’s incomprehensible to the rest of the world—they can live on through mutual exchange of feeling.
But if someone simply refuses to understand me, there is no language through which I can make them understand what I’m saying. Someone who doesn’t like me, or who doesn’t like what I’m saying in that moment—it is very difficult, and often nearly impossible, to make such a person understand what I want to say. But whoever likes me doesn’t need much explanation—they understand on their own!

I cannot speak any language with someone who does not wish to hear what I have to say, who refuses to understand what I am trying to convey. But if it were possible to do this: to walk the very path by which *he* wishes to understand, to move in the way *he* chooses to move—then making him grasp my thoughts and words would be no difficulty at all. Now I understand how helpless language truly is! You cannot force understanding upon anyone. Even those two universal languages of this world—hunger and desire—if someone has no need for them, or if circumstance has bred in him a revulsion toward them, then not even these two can ever satisfy him.

For some days now I have been using Foucault’s philosophy to my advantage! I no longer attempt to make anyone understand through my own language; everyone interprets things in their own way. Just the other day I told a man, “Brother, I’ve spent all my tuition money on this pain in my hand, seen so many doctors for it…” The next day he tells me, “Brother, you have so much pain in your hand—why don’t you see a doctor? You don’t take care of yourself…” and so on and so forth! My mood turned foul! What did I even try to explain to him that day? Instead of arguing, I simply supported his words! “Yes, you’re absolutely right—I don’t see doctors, I don’t take care of myself. Really, one must look after oneself…” Hearing this, he was overjoyed and invited me for grilled chicken! I myself was amazed at the success of my own duplicity! Nobody actually listens to everything anyone says; people listen only to what they wish to hear, ignore the rest, merely stare in the direction of the speaker. Superficiality triumphs in precisely this way! Nobody cares about the true impulsive instincts. That words themselves can be fractured, that new meanings can be created from those broken words—who has the time to ponder such things? People listen to and retain only as much as they wish to hear.

There are two kinds of truth. One: the truth that is actual. This is called the truth of understanding. Two: the truth one enjoys accepting. This is called the truth of the heart. People generally love to seek and hold fast to the truths of the heart. Whatever seems convenient for them to accept as truth, whatever they can find in someone—that person they begin to call their own. For such a person they are willing to give everything. No matter what they say aloud, nearly everyone ultimately wishes to remain within the comfort zone of their own thinking. People even readily accept unpleasant lies, so long as those lies do not pull them out of their safe zone! So long as a person remains within his own safe zone, neither truth nor falsehood truly matters to him.