I am more than midway the Nishitani book. It is a challenging read introducing me to literature that I have only heard others speak of. In this quoted passage the author comments upon Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

At this moment 9:09AM Starbucks is busy, almost crowded. I can hear the buzz of conversations around me, blended with the omnipresent music. I imagine myself seated at any of the tables, easily fitting into the flow of the conversation. Even so, that would be role-playing, like an actor on stage. The urge to say anything at all would be my proclivity to play-the-game, to make a move that no one else could foresee. I wonder if “this” makes me abnormal, this observational point of undying skepticism?

I am certain of just one thing. The only thing of which I have no doubt: everything in this room, and every person – is as it and they are, and could be no other. I am who I am and there could have been no other result from my upbringing, in my own time in the 50s and 60s. To say it again that goes for everyone in this room. Even for you as you read this. Those around me think and speak as they are bound to do, at this moment of their lives, and given the relationship between themselves. This is the wall of which Dostoyevsky writes.

Perhaps (or perhaps not) I am alone, with a refracted consciousness in this room. I have met just a few others. Sometimes I envy those who are normal, who never have the uncanny sense of being alone, an actor on stage fated to play a part.

While watching television, inwardly cringing, enduring commercials, those visual verbal overtures to persuade the viewer to exchange money for some fulfillment of desire – the commercials for the big and expensive GMC Sierra trucks are emblematic of what passes for “normal.”  Never mind the establishment of detention camps for Illegal residents rounded up by ICE, pay no attention to the expunging of WOKE words from Federal documents — what you need is a new GMC Sierra truck! Enjoy the commercial at the end of this post..

…the normal man
restricts his movements
to the surface of the world,
not sensing the confinement
of the wall within the world and the self.

He does not possess
the “intensified consciousness”
that is refracted
from the wall
toward the inside, the thoroughly examined
self-consciousness that is
“consciousness” in the true sense.

This is what keeps him
dull-witted but healthy.

For the underground man,
“not only an excess of consciousness
but any consciousness is a disease. (VI)
From his perspective even though the normal man
is obtuse, or rather precisely because of his obtuseness,
he is normal.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji, trans. by Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, page 141