Nausea

Intimations of reality

Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and I am here; the one who splits the night, and I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

Something is going to happen: something is waiting for me in the shadow of the Rue Basse-de-Vielle, it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin. . . .

The place is full. The air is blue with cigarette smoke and steam rising from damp clothing. The cashier is at her counter. I know her well: she's red haired, as I am; she has some sort of stomach trouble. She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the odour of violets given off by a decomposing body. A shudder goes through me; she . . . she is the one who is waiting for me. . . .

When I found myself on the Boulevard do la Redoute again nothing was left by bitter regret. I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to so much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?

—1969 edition, pp 54-56

'Suffering is the origin of consciousness,' Dostoevsky wrote. But suffering is everywhere in the presence of thought and sensitivity. Sartre for his part has written, and with equal simplicity: 'Life begins on the other side of despair.'

-Hayden Carruth (In his "Introduction" to the American edition of Nausea.)