Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city and this nature; I must choose.

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

I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me—and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth—lying low—grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

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.

Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.