Category: Culture

The stuff that makes life worth liv­ing.

upon reread­ing Nau­sea i am inter­est­ed in the exis­ten­tial­ist take on regret. Roquentin seems less alien­at­ed to me than he did the last time i vis­it­ed him, instead he seems more con­cerned with what used to be and what has changed. he does not accept this change to Nau­sea and mourns for his past. is this Sartre’s exam­ple of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of infi­nite res­ig­na­tion?’ and why is the extreme aware­ness of being-in-itself so dis­gust­ing? why is this knowl­edge of dif­fer­ence nau­seous instead of euphor­ic? it does­n’t sick­en me…

I must not put strange­ness where there is none. I think that is the big dan­ger in keep­ing a diary: you exag­ger­ate every­thing. You con­tin­u­al­ly force the truth because you’re always look­ing for some­thing.

Jean-Paul Sartre — Nau­sea