— The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter 20
About this quote
हिन्दी में
कोई भी आदमी लंबे समय तक अपने सामने एक चेहरा और दुनिया के सामने दूसरा नहीं रख सकता — आख़िरकार वह ख़ुद ही उलझ जाता है कि इनमें असली कौन-सा है।
What it means
The two load-bearing phrases are for any considerable period and bewildered. Neither is decorative. The first concedes that short-term performance is normal and survivable — everybody manages a face for an afternoon. The second names the injury precisely: not corruption, not punishment, but a failure of self-knowledge. The price of the divided life is not exposure; it is losing the instrument you would use to check.
The popular reading flattens this into a call for authenticity, which the sentence does not make. Speaking differently to your employer than to your mother is not what is described here. What is described is a face maintained against something specific and hidden, held long enough that the maintenance becomes automatic — at which point the performed version has as much daily evidence behind it as the real one, and no obvious way to tell them apart.
What it teaches you
Separate adjusting your manner, which is ordinary, from sustaining a version of yourself that requires one particular fact stay suppressed. Then measure the second in months, because the line puts the whole risk on duration. A practical check: try stating plainly, to yourself, which account of you is true. If that takes effort to answer, or if you find yourself defending the public version in your own head when no one has challenged it, that is exactly the bewilderment named here — and it arrives long before anyone else notices anything.
अर्थ और सीख
इस वाक्य के दो शब्द सबसे अहम हैं — ‘लंबे समय तक’ और ‘उलझ जाना’। थोड़ी देर के लिए अलग चेहरा रखना सामान्य है; नुक़सान अवधि से होता है, और वह नुक़सान सज़ा नहीं, बल्कि यह है कि आदमी की अपने बारे में जानने की क्षमता ही ख़राब हो जाती है। सबक़ यह कि दफ़्तर और घर में अलग ढंग से बोलना यह बात नहीं है — बात उस चेहरे की है जो किसी एक छिपाई हुई सच्चाई के ख़िलाफ़ महीनों टिकाया जाए; अगर ख़ुद से साफ़-साफ़ कहने में अटकन हो कि असली आप कौन हैं, तो वही चेतावनी है।
Where it comes from
The narrator on Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister whose private guilt is destroying him while his congregation reveres him. Hawthorne’s grammar matters — the line is stated as a general law, then applied.
The novel’s real subject is not the adultery but the concealment: Hester, whose shame is public, is the only character who stays intact.
