I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning.
nauseaby jean-paul Sartre
There’s the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn’t I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all.
Tuesday: Nothing. Existed.
I do not think, therefore I am a moustache.
We stay silent for a moment. Evening is coming on; I can hardly make out the pale spot of her face. Her black dress melts with the shadow which floods the room. I pick up my cup mechanically, there’s a little tea left in it and I bring it to my lips. The tea is cold. I want to smoke but I don’t dare. I have the terrible feeling that we have nothing more to say to one another.
He is not one: he is afraid. What is he afraid of? When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use. Then it disappears and what you wanted to understand disappears with it.
But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged.
The idea is still there, unnameable. It waits, peacefully. Now it seems to say: Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that’s exactly what you’ve never had (remember you fooled yourself with words, you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets adventure) and this is what you’ll never have — and no one other than yourself. But Why? WHY?
We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these, tress, these gates, these stones.
Thus pleasure itself, also becoming a right, lost its aggressive futility.
