Nausea (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Now there is this tune on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A conceited little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: ‘You must do like us, suffer in strict time.’ Well, yes! Of course I’d be glad to suffer that way, in strict time, without any complacency, without any self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am superfluous, if the sincerest and driest of my sufferings trails along heavily, with too much flesh and its skin too loose, like the sea-elephant, with bulging eyes which are wet and touching yet so ugly? No, they certainly can’t say it’s compassionate, this little diamond pain which is spinning around above the record and dazzling me. It isn’t even ironic: it spins gaily, completely absorbed in itself; it has cut like a scythe through the insipid intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the burly man, the patronne, I myself and the tables, the benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us who were abandoning ourselves to existence, because we were between ourselves, just between ourselves – it has caught us in our untidy, everyday condition: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it. It does not exist. It is even irritating in its non-existence; if I were to get up, if I were to snatch that record from the turn-table which is holding it an...

Nausea