Text: Xu Lu| Anchor: Sun Hongbo
In the office where I work, there is often an awkward and comical situation. Working with some colleagues, obviously he is sitting behind me, walking a few steps to speak, but somehow, both people are more willing to type and communicate online, as if direct face-to-face will stimulate some kind of inexplicable uneasiness and fear, and this uneasiness is unnecessary and can be escaped. Sometimes, the two can even laugh and laugh on the Internet, but when they meet in the corridor, they still unconsciously look away. Keeping distance gives each other a sense of security, and the strange feeling that suddenly arises in their hearts can quickly disappear, as long as everyone tells themselves that this is a normal and natural thing.
Choosing modern life seems to mean getting used to many of these things. For example, you have to get used to being lonely and distant, used to being under the same roof with your roommates but not even knowing each other's names, used to acting as inconspicuous screws in the company, used to taking time out of your own life, and tracking other people's daily lives on the Internet. At a time when this kind of thing seems to be becoming more and more normal, I don't know if you will still feel an indescribable uneasiness in some moment, because a small thing that seems trivial will fall into a collapse, as if the straw that covers the trap has suddenly been sucked away, and you have fallen into some kind of abyss that you have been trying to avoid.
/ Part 01
"Behind social fear, there is a deeper fear"
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In the novel "The Dove" by the German writer Juskinder, the master, Zhnadan, suddenly encounters such a dilemma. He was fifty years old, the gatekeeper of a Parisian bank, rented an apartment for twenty years, worked and lived a stable bachelor's life, not associating with anyone. Suddenly, one morning, Jonadan opened the door, ready to meet the ordinary life of the new day, only to find a dying pigeon lying in the doorway, looking at Jonadan with an empty and numb gaze. Somehow, the pigeon made Yonadan feel a fear that he had never felt before.
We know very little about Jonadan's past, except that he experienced the Nazi reign of terror as a child, lost his parents, eloped with his wife in his twenties, and gradually lost trust in people. The only thing that gave Jonadan a sense of security was the little house he lived in, and after half a lifetime of hard work, he was finally able to buy it. But the appearance of a dead pigeon suddenly caused turmoil in his peaceful life.
Imagine such a dying pigeon that suddenly blocks you on your way to work, staring at you with a blind look, full of nothingness and death. In addition to the completely physiological shock and freezing, a fear of infinitely close to death spreads in your body, and this fear comes too suddenly, and you are not mentally prepared for it. When you come back to your senses, you hurriedly retract your feet and hide in the door, only to find that your heart is beating more and more violently, and even though you understand that this pigeon is no threat to you, the horror cannot be dissipated.
If the horror is not the pigeon itself, then what is it? Of course, Jonadan didn't know the answer, he just felt a cold sweat and his heart pounding, as if some voice was gushing from the bottom of his heart saying to him: "You're going to die?" You're old and exhausted. A pigeon is enough to scare you half to death, and a pigeon drives you back into the house, paralyzing you and grabbing you. You're going to die, Jonadan, you're going to die, if not right away, in a few moments. Your life is false, you make a mess of it, because a pigeon shakes it up. ”
At such moments, the vibration caused by the pigeon is actually Jonadan's doubts about his own life. He had tried to fight and cover up the loneliness and helplessness of life with a house of his own, but at this moment, he found that all his sense of security had failed, and he was locked in his own room and had to face his own failure and powerlessness.
Fear is constantly amplified and constantly changing shapes. If you feel like a coward when you feel scared for no reason, then there will be a little more shame on top of the fear. If this sense of shame is exposed, then there is a hint of despair. Jonadan was trapped at home by a pigeon, and he didn't even dare to go out to the toilet, so he urinated in the washbasin, and when the pressure on his lower abdomen was reduced, Jonadan felt a strong sense of shame. He couldn't stand it anymore and he had to escape the place and stay outside for a few days. He immediately packed his bags, and then found that he had inadvertently burst into tears, and he felt as if he had lived thirty years in vain, and now he was even more defeated than he had been thirty years ago.
When he finally used all his strength, was fully armed, packed up and went to work, he felt a new fear. He met an acquaintance, the janitor, Mrs. Rocard. Jonadan was afraid that Madame Rocard would see her embarrassment, and even became angry at Rocard's greeting, thinking, "Hell, why did she pay attention to me again?" Why should I be scrutinized by her again? Why couldn't she just ignore me and let me maintain my integrity? Why are some people always so annoying? ”
Jonadan felt that he was exposed to Madame Rocard's gaze, and wanted to regain a little dignity, so the ghost made god stop her for the first time and defend himself. Jonadan mentioned the dying pigeon at the door and said that it had made a mess of the corridor, but he had a lot to do and had to go to work on time, so he didn't have time to drive the pigeon out. But as he spoke, he felt that the lies could not have been more obvious, and perhaps Madame Rocard had seen that it was absolutely impossible for him to drive the pigeon away; on the contrary, it was the pigeon that drove him out. Jonadan felt himself hot, all the blood rushing to his head, and his cheeks turned red. He regretted why he had stopped Madame Rocard, and finally escaped from the courtyard.
Jonadan's reactions and mental activities in the face of Mrs. Rocard can be said to be a deep symptom of social fear, but it cannot be summed up in a nutshell by the term "social phobia." Behind the fear of a pigeon lies a deep helplessness, a deep fright, a strong sense of shame, a trauma of deprivation, and a deep emptiness. In fact, for Yonadan, the pigeon is more like a trigger, he triggers a primitive sensitivity in Yonadan's heart. For the previous twenty years, he had been hiding this sensitivity with loneliness and monotony.
How to get along with our inner sensitivities is not only a problem for Jonadan, but also a problem for each of us. You can choose to use various ways to make yourself have the so-called "blunt feeling", but there are always some feelings, you can't escape, it will still sneak to the door unexpectedly.
/ Part 02
"Do you really want to be a tool man?"
Escaping from home, Jonadan arrived at the bank on time with his luggage and began the day's security work. Nowadays, the term "tool man" is increasingly used to describe people who are objectified in their work, so jonathan is really a real tool man, and his main job every day is to stand at the door of the bank and open the door for the boss and customers. Most of the time, he stood on the steps in a quiet daze.
In fact, despite his name as a security guard, Yonadan himself knew that if he did encounter a bank robbery, he would be killed in five seconds. He played a role simply by being present, and there was no difference at all in changing people, but this effect gave him an alternative sense of existence, as the novel says: "It is precisely because of the awareness of this symbolic power that Jonadan has been a guard for thirty years." This symbolic power formed all his pride and self-esteem, gave him strength and patience, gave him more effective protection than attention, weapons, and bulletproof glass, and to this day he stands on the marble steps in front of the bank without fear, without doubt, without a trace of dissatisfaction, without a dull and indifferent facial expression. ”
The sense of accomplishment that Jonadan gained at work, like the sense of security he had gained in his own cabin, was a thick defense that allowed him to hide in the house, behind his identity as a security guard, and spend the day in peace. He had long learned not to think about meaning, to be content to be in his comfort zone all the time, even though that comfort stood up to scrutiny.
But today, Jonadan can no longer stand as calmly as he once did. The fear that the pigeon had aroused did not disappear, but spread to his work. Yonadan felt his body become heavy, his eyes blurred, and his whole body was itching continuously, and he could no longer keep standing, but could only quietly rub against the pillar to relieve a little itching. Once, the president of the bank's car honked its horn for half a day, and Yonadan did not react, which had never happened before. This aroused in his mind a fear of the future, and he thought: "If you don't see this car today, then you may neglect the whole work tomorrow, you may lose the key to the iron fence door, next month you will be disgracefully fired, and you will not be able to find a new job, because who will hire a useless person?" No one can live on unemployment benefits. By then you had long since lost your room, where a pigeon lived. ”
It was as if Jonadan suddenly had to realize that his need for the job was far greater than the need for him. During his lunch break, he saw a homeless man in the park, and suddenly thought that he had seen this homeless man defecating openly in the park, and thinking of this, Jonadan felt that he needed this job more than ever, at least he could not be reduced to the point of showing his ass on the street and pulling shit in front of everyone. If a person cannot find even a safe place to go to the toilet, and even deprives him of the freedom to avoid others in the midst of embarrassment, then his life becomes worthless and meaningless. It was only then that Jonathan realized how weak the seemingly solid life he had spent twenty years painstakingly building was, and that if he was not careful, he would fall apart.
The contradiction that Jonadan experienced is probably also the situation of many contemporary people in their work. Standardized, division of labor work, on the one hand, gives your life a certain sense of dignity and value, but at the same time makes you no longer like yourself, but can only be attached to a certain standard, a certain illusion. What is even more tragic is that work can somehow mask personal difficulties, but at the same time it can deepen personal spiritual difficulties.
Like Jonadan, who was standing at the bank door that day, he felt as if he had turned into a joke and that something was wrong everywhere. In order to make himself more comfortable and not out of shape, he quietly squirmed his body, and felt even more ashamed of this squirming. In the novel, it is written: "He felt that he had become strange, and in front of him appeared a caricature of the guard, a cartoon of himself. He despised himself and hated himself for those hours. He resented himself with rage, wanted to rush out of his skin, and he really wanted to rush out of his skin, because the skin all over his body was itching at this moment. ”
Tool man, tool man, as if he had to become some kind of tool before he could qualify as a man. But man is man, man will feel the itch that tools cannot experience, man will be ashamed of himself, and man will feel hopeless in life.
/ Part 03
"Behind the shame is the lack of love"
We can probably feel that one of the feelings that Jonadan felt most strongly under fear was a sense of shame. He staged one clown after another alone in a place where no one was paying attention, and even he was the only audience, but he imagined in his mind that countless audiences were watching him laugh, so he began to laugh at himself. He stood there, motionless for hours, and he felt his spine bend more and more, his shoulders, neck, and head hanging lower and lower, and his body was short and fat, like a toad.
Subsequently, "his long-simmering self-hatred filled his whole body, and then poured out of his body, pouring into the increasingly sinister and fierce eyes under the brim of his hat, turning into an extremely rough hatred of the outside world." We can see that beneath Yonadan's sense of shame lies another feeling, which is anger, where he feels out of place and the world is hostile to him. This anger turned into an aggressive desire, and he was fed up with the pretentious urban men and women, the bus drivers who made noise on the street, the waiters who saw only a tip in their eyes, and he really wanted to rush up and beat them, even take out a pistol and shoot them randomly. At that moment, he just wanted to die with the world.
But this anger against others did not last long, and Jonadan finally realized that he did not have the strength to fight the world, he could not attack anyone, only himself. His anger came from his powerlessness, he could no longer control himself, he felt that he was about to faint on the ground, but he couldn't even do that. Jonadan thought, "When he was young, he used to have this kind of ability. He could cry whenever he wanted; he could hold his breath until he fainted, and he could even make his heart stop beating once.
Now he couldn't do anything, he couldn't dominate himself anymore. He could no longer even bend his knees and squat on the ground. He can only stand and endure everything." Jonadan's life was shattered, he was no longer able to integrate it, and he even thought of suicide.
We can also find that behind Yonadan's anger, there is actually a kind of extreme helplessness. He was abandoned by his parents because of the war when he was a child, and when he grew up, he married just to seek a sense of security, but he was abandoned by his wife again. No one around him ever seemed to care for him or support him. How great his fear was, how helpless his heart was. His loneliness, his house, his work, are all tools to cover up this helplessness.
That night, Jonadan fell asleep in the makeshift inn, and suddenly a huge thunder sounded in the middle of the night, causing Jonadan to feel a physiological fear again. He shook uncontrollably, and the bed shook with it. The moment he opened his eyes, Jonadan felt a trance, as if he were still in a frightened moment as a child, and the novel writes what Jonadan said to himself in his heart at this moment: "This is the cellar, yes, the cellar, you are in the cellar of your parents' house, you are a child, you just had a dream, dreaming that you have grown up and become a nasty elderly guard in Paris; but you are a child, sitting in the cellar of your parents' house, fighting outside, you are captured, buried, Forgotten. Why didn't they come? Why didn't they save me? Why is there a dead silence here? Where are the others? My God, where the hell are the others? I can't live without anyone else! ”
Jonadan almost cried out, trying to shout into the darkness, "I can't live without anyone else!" "It is only then that we have further discovered that behind Jonadan's helplessness, what is hidden most is a fear of abandonment, a hopeless loneliness. It turned out that in his childhood, he had felt this existential threat countless times, and this fear had always dominated him, and even when he was fifty years old, it would still suddenly erupt, making him want to end his life immediately.
After the rumbling thunder, Yonadan felt a heavy rain outside, and he lay in bed for a long time, feeling as if the thunderstorm had helped him release a lot of unconscious fear and anxiety. The next day, on another bright and cool day, Yonadan felt that everything had been given a new lease of life, and when he returned home, he found the aisle empty, the pigeons gone, the pigeon droppings on the floor had been wiped off, and not even a feather was left on the red tiles. All the fears of yesterday vanished as if they had never happened.
The story ends abruptly at this point, leaving the reader with a lot of room for imagination. But we finally end up in the deepest recesses of the owner's heart, Nadan. I would like to believe that, at least on that thunderstorm night, Jonadan understood and accepted himself for the first time in his life, an old man at fifty years old who was still half frightened to death by a pigeon, and a lonely child who hid in the cellar and felt abandoned and forgotten, a lonely child who had never really grown up.
【Topic of this issue】: What are you afraid of? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section.
About the author of this article
Xu Lu, book editor, contracted writer of Shangguan Wenlu Reading Club.
About the host of this article
Sun Hongbo
Mr. Shan Tianfang, a master of storytelling, entered the room as a disciple, and was an associate professor of broadcast hosting, and the broadcast works "Chu Han Zhengxiong", "Bloody Plum Blossom", "Pride and Prejudice", "Outsider" and so on were broadcast exclusively in Cool I Music and Cool I Listen.
Audio Production: Shangguan Wenlu Sound Studio - Haoze