Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Perhaps only at the end of the novel, when he appears to choose art and the life of the artist, does he make a meaningful, free choice.

Put more simply, the self is entirely free, unstable, and impermanent, and knows this. From this sense of absolute freedom is born anguish, a sense of dread. Thus the self will try to hide its liberty from itself, in acts of bad faith. Bad faith is the best proof, argues Sartre, that we are indeed free and that we know it.

But his self-awareness seems to offer him no actual freedom. Not because, like his fellow-citizens, he runs away from freedom, but because he appears to having nothing to do with his freedom, nothing to commit it to. In some sense, his freedom has been corroded by his sense of his own freedom.

Camus reviewed Nausea when it appeared and, while dazzled by the book, disliked its philosophy. He did not make explicit his objection, but one can surmise that he disliked Sartre’s fatalism. For Camus, the realization that life is absurd is the beginning of a stoic battle against that absurdity. Camus concluded, in The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, “with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death. Sartre by contrast, at least in this novel, has got beyond — or never reaches — such a state of flushed challenge. In the park, Roquentin thinks about killing himself, but comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that given life’s randomness, suicide too would be random, and thus meaningless: “But my death itself would have been superfluous.” In other words. Roquentin is already dead, so why bother killing himself? Certainly, this would have seemed intensely fatalistic to Camus.

Although Camus argued that after God we create our own meaning, one feels that he never really believed in self-determination as absolutely as Sartre did. Camus continued to live under a religious shadow, wherein the battle was always with the terms handed to us by life — a secular version of man’s battle with the Gods. Life was a religious sentence for Camus; he never quite relinquished the idea that meaning has left a residue of itself in the world. Sartre found Camus’s religiosity frustrating, and said so; it was, along with political differences, one of the reasons for the break between the two men in the early 1950s. Sartre, though his language is sometimes religious, never had any time for religion. Camus was a tragic religionist, really; Sartre was, as he described himself, “a providential atheist.”

If Camus and Sartre resemble each other in this area, it is because it is impossible to “solve” the dilemma of the realization that “one cannot define existence as necessity,” or that “there is absolutely no more reason for existing.” Since both thinkers conclude that we must continue to live, both are pushed to logical contradiction: both have to furnish non-arbitrary or necessary reasons for continuing to live in an arbitrary or non-necessary world.

The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. This is what has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect.

If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified. It isn’t that my life is rich, or weighty or precious. But I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where?

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls.

At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the authority and immense erudition drawn from the papers crushed in his hand.

I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

I had imagined that at certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little precision.

Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead.

“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.”

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a landmark, you realize that you’re going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926. That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. “I was out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, moro...

The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts.

Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them . . . there is nothing.

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 jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh.

My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think . . . and I can’t stop myself from thinking. At this very moment—it’s frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head . . . if I yield, they’re going to come round in front of me, between my eyes—and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.

“Really, nowhere? Then, Monsieur,” he says, his face growing sad, “it is because it is not true. If it were true, someone would already have thought of it.”

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.

the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.

The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to he 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.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing more at all.

existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing

They did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves. So they quietly minded their own business; the sap rose up slowly through the structure, half reluctant, and the roots sank slowly into the earth.

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