Nausea

”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 life as if he were recounting it. But you have to choose: to live or to recount.”

There is something profound in this. It’s as if we’ve confused memories for the real thing – for the actual moment – and so we spend the moment creating a memory, because we’re under the impression that memories last while moments are ever so fickle.

There’s that feeling of existing at different planes of existence if you will, or as seperations of the mind. On one hand there’s the doer, the one who takes action, and one the other there’s the observer. In turn the observer, too, comes in parts, one of them being as a judge, that constant evaluation of experience.

If the judge takes up too much space, if we start to put too much focus in evaluation, it’s as if you create a backlog in your mind. You lose that fresh air of spontaneity which we see and so often praise in children, the ability to exist without judging. What this means practically is that, because all your actions are evaluated before being performed, everything you do is on a delay. It’s hard to notice at first because it’s not a physical delay, as soon as the active thought of moving your hand forms the hand is of course moved, but rather it’s an inner delay. You become off-beat, untuned, no longer in sync with the world. In other words, you become reactionary. We’re convinced that this is normal, that human existence is precisely that of being alien to the world, apart and not a part.

”In point of fact, people talk a lot about this famous passing of time, but you scarcely see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she will be old, only you don’t see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her growing old and you feel yourself growing old with her: that is the feeling of adventure.”

Time is interesting because as with so many other things we confuse concept for reality. This isn’t surprising at all if you think about it, considering how much time we spend in our heads. Time only really exists as a concept, because in reality there are nothing but moments. This is clear because the only way we can relate to the passing of time is through our memories, which are doubtful at the very best. Is adventure then, only a quality that can be estowed after the fact? Feeling like you’re in an adventure thus being the quality of imagining yourself in the future looking back at the moment you’re currently in.

”Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.”

As in a popular Buddhist saying: emptiness is form – form is emptiness. In other words, things are empty in-and-of-themselves, they are nothing more than what they are, but so aswell is the concept of emptiness a thing.

”And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.”

This sentence will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. Of course not in-and-of-itself, but that feeling which Sartre descibes as Nausea. It really is true though, there is no going back after the fact no matter how much one might try. And believe me, I’ve tried. It’s not all bad though, there is an argument to be made for the tearing of the veil being a renewal, a second birth, a birth of the soul. That distinct moment when you realise that you’re alive, and nothing will ever be the same.

”Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” As if it wasn’t getting any more gruesome.

”You know, it’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness… There is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.”

I don’t think I’ve ever despised a character as much as Anny.