Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.

I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.

I am touched, I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. I have had real adventures. I can recapture no detail but I perceive the rigorous succession of circumstances. I have crossed seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into forests, always making my way towards other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and never was I able to turn back, any more than a record can be reversed. And all that led me—where?

The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine.

For the moment they wanted to live with the least expenditure, economize words, gestures, thoughts, float: they had only one day in which to smooth out their wrinkles, their crow’s feet, the bitter lines made by a hard week’s work. One day only.

You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she’ll be old, only you don’t see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

Must not forget that de Rollebon now represents the only justification for my existence.

experience was much more than a defence against death; it was a right; the right of old men.

The letters I had just inscribed on it were not even dry yet and already they belonged to the past.

M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence.

“I usually come here with a book, even though it’s against doctor’s orders: one eats too quickly and doesn’t chew.

I have no troubles, I have money like a capitalist, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that’s all.

Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists;

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.

A year from now I’d find myself as empty as I am today, without even a memory, and a coward facing death.