“She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I
wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow,
of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't
wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it
would be impossible for her: she is bound.”
It's very strange that the character envies her- he feels empty in his solitude...
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say—yes you might say, nature without humanity."
"My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves."
“There are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is
left but words: I
could still tell stories, tell them too well (as far as anecdotes are
concerned, I can stand up to anyone except ship's officers and professional
people) but these are only the skeletons.
There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I
have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more
about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I
pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New
images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never
travelled. My words are dreams, that is all. For a hundred dead stories there
still remain one or two living ones. I evoke these with caution, occasionally,
not too often, for fear of wearing them out, I fish one out, again I see the
scenery, the characters, the attitudes. I stop suddenly: there is a flaw, I
have seen a word pierce through the web of
sensations. I suppose that this word will soon take the place of several
images I love. I must stop quickly and think of something else; I don't want to
tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them a good part will be
congealed.”
Do I have a
connection with MY past? Even though we are the same person does that connect
us? Or is it a stranger, which has lived and experienced a different sensation
that I remember now?This reminds me of White Nights- rekindling old dead memories.
"Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass."
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.You might as well try and catch time by the tail."
"As long as we loved each other, we never allowed the meanest of our instants, he smallest grief, to be detached and forgotten, left behind. Sounds, smells, nuances of light, even the we never told each other; we carried them all away and they remained alive: even now they have the power to give us joy and pain. Not a memory: an implacable, torrid love, without shadow,without escape, without shelter. Three years rolled into one. That is why we parted: we did not have enough strength to bear this burden."
Are memories too dangerous to carry around? Do they become too heavy? And what should one do- only remember the important ones?
"I jump up: 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. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: "I have to fi. . . I ex. . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not ... I ex. . ." It goes, it goes . . . and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought—I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. How serpentine is this feeling of existing—I unwind it, slowly. ... If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: "Smoke . . .not to think . . . don't want to think ... I think I don't want to think. I mustn't think that I don't want to think. Because that's still a thought." Will there never be an end to it?"
"I am a criminal with bleeding flesh, bleeding with existence to these walls."
"People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea."
I love his comment on the humanist, that the self-made man sees humans as symbols and not as what they really are.
Sartre keeps talking about crabs.
"Things are divorced from their names.They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic
and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenceless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me. They demand nothing, they don't impose themselves: they are there"
“The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it
will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an
illness or a passing fit: it is I.”
"[...] the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness."
"And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way."
"That black against my foot, it didn't look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by someone who had never seen black and who wouldn't know how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous being beyond colours. It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or asecretion, like an oozing- "
What if things are not what we want them to be? Or the names we give them doesn't make them what we define them as?
"Things—you might have called them thoughts—which stopped halfway, which were forgotten, which forgot what they wanted to think and which stayed like that, hanging about with an odd little sense which was beyond them."
"Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar."
"Men all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, pass heavily in front of me, their eyes staring, fleeing their ills yet carrying them with them, open-mouthed, with their insect-tongue flapping its wings."
It's true- what would ordinary people do when something abnormal happens?
"And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot."
"No, they certainly can't tell me it's compassionate—this little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it."
"[...] they have washed themselves of the sin of existing"
Pain is self-absorbed.
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Honestly, I would have thought the character was experiencing some type of psychedelic experience... because a lot of things from his imagination reminds one of this. Other than that- TO EXIST. I myself don't really understand it much, but from what I got from it- it means that one has to be conscious of existence. And at the same time he seems to end with how existing is very painful and difficult only to find himself some type of goal making existence worth it.
I really liked his style. Choppy. I need to read more of him.
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