Frank W. Dremel
Section 6
Part 2
Have you ever
read a book that changed your mind about something important to you? This
discussion question appealed to me as I have been in love with books since
before birth. Which book to choose, I thought. The answer was as obvious as it
was new. Yesterday, I might have chosen Hitchhiker’s
Guide or Atlas Shrugged or even Harry Potter.
However because
of this philosophy class, I’d recently been compelled to read Jean-Paul
Sartre’s Nausea. I’m not sure whether
I can say it changed my mind, but beyond that, it affirmed quite spectacularly
something which had always been on the periphery of my brain, almost teasing me
with its unassailability. The Truth is I exist. Moreover, my existence is
inescapable to the point of nausea.
In Nausea, from the very first page,
Monsieur Roquentin is almost bombarded by several inexorable instances of confronting
his increasing awareness. Awareness of what, you may ask. The short answer is
Awareness of everything. But there is more, so much more, he reveals. He is
caught between the seemingly dull routine of his life and the sickeningly
fascinating realization of his own existence, of the existence of objects
around him, of the existence of the absence of objects, of the essence of
Existence. As he notices every day common place objects – a man’s suspenders, a
cup, his own hand, a bench – those objects become simultaneously real and very
unreal. The reality of their existence, of his own existence, becomes an ugly,
sickening fullness, swallowed up in emptiness. He doesn’t even intend to look
or study an object, yet when he looks at it, he can’t escape it. Objects change
while he’s looking at them, yet they remain the same. Once he was staring at
rows of books, all alphabetical. Yet that day they seemed to dissolve and fade
on each side.
For Roquentin as
well as myself, this increasing self-discovery culminates in his interaction
one day with a simple tree root, reaching up out of the ground with its “black,
knotty hands”. Yet when he stops himself to examine both the root and himself,
he realizes the root isn’t black. It is black, but it isn’t. Is it more than
black or somehow less? It was a colour, yet it wasn’t. Suddenly he, or was it
I, felt “in the way”.
And not temporarily in the way, but for all eternity.
Then it happened
to him – and somehow to me: the nausea that comes with knowing you are in the
way for eternity, for an unimaginable, unmeasurable, unending amount of time. And
as he had observed earlier, he hadn’t asked to be here. I felt so clearly,
almost as looking down at myself, like the fly in the spider’s web. The fly is
us. We are all thrust into this thing called Life, through no conscious
decision of our own. And we are trapped here forever.
I began to
contemplate the meaning of “forever”. No matter what one calls it: forever,
infinity, perpetuity, till the end of time --- what does that even mean? The “end”
of time doesn’t exist. It’s the only Actor in our Play that truly doesn’t
exist. For if one considers time as a “scientist” such as Einstein or Max
Planck, whether it is linear or circular or otherwise, time itself doesn’t end.
It could theoretically only change.
So whether I
believe in life after death or not, the reality is that I either exist forever,
however morphed my existence may become, or I cease to exist forever, in which
case the very fact that I once existed means my existence doesn’t end, it still
just alters. Now, as Roquentin, I am completely engulfed in the realization of
my own existence.
Roquentin early
on chooses to overcome, or at the very least be content with, his despair by
listening to jazz. The complex simplicity of the music, or perhaps the simple
complexity, is enough at first to combat his warring emotions. He can
temporarily lose himself in the jazz, whether it is that he is distancing
himself or merely finding a musical substitute. But after his experience with
the root and his decision to leave his woman-friend Anny and his surroundings,
he can’t even bear to have the record played. For him initially, jazz was
perhaps the definition of his existential experience – acknowledgement, freedom,
and transcendence. As Sartre said in Being
and Nothingness, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the
world, he is responsible for everything he does.” And, “I am responsible for
everything … except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of
my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible.
I am abandoned in the world … in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone
and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility
without being able, whatever I do,
to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.”
It all comes
back to the fly in the spider web. We are here, we are free, it’s forever. Either
one exists forever, or one ceases to exist forever. To borrow from Kierkegaard,
you will regret it either way.
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