The Setting Sun

by Osamu Dazai

Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.

Thus every day, from morning to night, I wait in despair for something. I wish I could be glad that I was born, that I am alive, that there are people and a world. Won’t you shove aside the morality that blocks you?

whether the sensation of happiness might not be something like faintly glittering gold sunken at the bottom of the river of sorrow.