homework

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Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea, selection

[The mystical existential experience of the character Roquentin:]

I can't say I feel relieved or satisfied; just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I

know what I wanted to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The

Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it,

it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my

bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the

significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have

traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black,

knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of "existence."

I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I

said, like them, "The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it

existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence hides itself. It is there,

around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch

it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head

was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "to be." Or else I was thinking . . .

how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the

class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at

things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them

up in my hands, they served me as tools, 1 foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the

surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it

was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything

in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled

itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root

was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that

had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This

veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene

nakedness. I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order

to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp posts of the bandstand and the Velleda, in

the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . how can I explain? They inconvenienced

me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more

reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the

bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret

Fountain sounded in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with signs; my nostrils overflowed

with a green, putrid odour. All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves drift into existence

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like those relaxed women who burst out laughing and say: "It's good to laugh," in a wet voice; they

were parading, one in front of the other, exchanging abject secrets about their existence. I realized

that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you

existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.

In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a deflection.

Trees, night-blue pillars, the happy bubbling of a fountain, vital smells, little heat-mists floating in

the cold air, a red-haired man digesting on a bench: all this somnolence, all these meals digested

together, had its comic side. . . . Comic ... no: it didn't go as far as that, nothing that exists can be

comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

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

the others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these

gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship

to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the

relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. Of these relations (which

I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities,

and directions)—I felt myself to be the arbitrator; they no longer had their teeth into things. In the

way, the chestnut tree there, opposite me, a little to the left. In the way, the Velleda. . . .

And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way.

Fortunately, I didn't feel it, although I realized it, but I was uncomfortable because I was afraid of

feeling it (even now I am afraid—afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up like

a wave). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives.

But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones,

between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have

been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled,

proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.

The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little while ago, in the garden, I couldn't find

it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn't need it: I thought without words, on things, with things.

Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, only this long serpent dead at my

feet, this wooden serpent. Serpent or claw or root or vulture's talon, what difference does it make.

And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the

key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this

fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched

the thing.

[ . . . ]

This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But

something fresh had just appeared in the very heart of this ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I

possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be

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easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot

define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be

encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have

understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal

being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability

which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park,

this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins

to float, as the other evening at the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous": here is Nausea; here there is what

those bastards— the ones on the Coteau Vert and others—try to hide from themselves with their

idea of their rights. But what a poor lie: no one has any rights; they are entirely free, like other

men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are

superfluous, that is to say, amorphous, vague, and sad.

[ . . . ]

Had I dreamed of this enormous presence? It was there, in the garden, toppled down into the trees,

all soft, sticky, soiling everything, all thick, a jelly. And I was inside, I with the garden. I was

frightened, furious, I thought it was so stupid, so out of place, I hated this ignoble mess. Mounting

up, mounting up as high as the sky, spilling over, filling everything with its gelatinous slither, and

I could see depths upon depths of it reaching far beyond the limits of the garden, the houses, and

Bouville, as far as the eye could reach. I was no longer in Bouville, I was nowhere, I was floating.

I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I

choked with rage at this gross, absurd being. You couldn't even wonder where all that sprang from,

or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness. It didn't make sense, the

World was everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had

never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what worried me: of course

there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it is not to exist. It

was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World,

eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in

this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other

and appeared after many others. I shouted "filth! What rotten filth!" and shook myself to get rid of

this sticky filth, but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled

at the depths of this immense weariness. And then suddenly the park emptied as through a great

hole, the World disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up—in any case, I saw no more of it;

nothing was left but the yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches rose upward.