Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

I noticed a dark red drop on the mayonnaise of a stuffed egg: it was blood. This red on the yellow made me sick at my stomach. Suddenly I had a vision: someone had fallen face down and was bleeding in the dishes. The egg had rolled in blood; the slice of tomato which crowned it had come off and fallen flat, red on red.

it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there’s no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth.

They are touching, but they also make me a little sick. I feel them so far from me: the warmth makes them languid, they pursue the same dream in their hearts, so low, so feeble. They are comfortable, they look with assurance at the yellow walls, the people, and they find the world pleasant as it is just as it is, and each one of them, temporarily, draws life from the life of the other. Soon the two of them will make a single life, a slow, tepid life which will have no sense at all—but they won’t notice it.

“You are gay, Monsieur,” the Self-Taught Man says to me circumspectly. “I was just thinking,” I tell him, laughing, “that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

I have the terrible feeling that we have nothing more to say to one another.

Good God! Is it I who is going to lead this mushroom existence? What will I do all day long? I’ll take walks. I’ll sit on a folding chair in the Tuileries—or rather on a bench, out of economy. I’ll read in the libraries. And then what? A movie once a week. And then what? Can I smoke a Voltigeur on Sunday? Shall I play croquet with the retired old men in the Luxembourg?

I’d better think about something else, because I’m playing a comedy now. I know very well that I don’t want to do anything: to do something is to create existence—and there’s quite enough existence as it is.

an existant can never justify the existence of another existant.