“There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it”*…
As many as a million young people. mostly young men, in Japan are thought to have become hikikomori— to have holed up in their homes, sometimes for decades at a time.
click here and agin to enlarge
The BBC has the full story at “Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?”
* Roland Barthes
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As we burrow under our blankets, we might slip birthday greetings under the bedroom door of that most-famous literary shut-in, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust; he was born on this date in 1871. Proust spent the last three years of his life confined to his cork-lined bedroom, working to complete what Somerset Maugham called the “greatest fiction to date,” the seven-volume novel A la Recherche de Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, or as more recently translated, In Search of Lost Time).
All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
– Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes Way
