Nausea

By Erin Deborah Waks

In Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, perhaps the most unnecessarily pretentious book I’ve read and actually understood (and not just because I read it in the original French, shameless flex), he captures the endless pain that is thinking. Pain in the brutal power our thoughts can have, and yet also pain in their impressive dullness:

‘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.’

My own thoughts are not as dark as Sartre’s, naturally. After all, my writing falls under the headline of ‘caffeinated beverages and nicotine-free lifestyle,’ a less dramatic counterpart to his ‘existentialism, humanism, and what is even the point in living’ (and that’s to flatter myself far enough to even strike a point of comparison between the two of us. In my dreams).

But I wager I know what he’s on about here. My thoughts often teeter between the dull (I’m hungry. Should I have another coffee? I wonder if I can finish this book by the end of the train ride. Here’s a stupid meme I need to send my brother. I’m going to tell my best friend I love her again today) up to the painful, the ones that constantly return, that leave a funny taste in my mouth (I feel really unwell. I’m panicking. I need help and don’t know what to do about it. Why does everything feel so hard?).

Sartre’s nausea may be based on an existential question about the meaning of life and the nature of thinking. Me, not so much. I’m not that concerned with the reasons for living, or the objective pointlessness of life, or greater philosophical questions. But sometimes my own, relatively banal, anxieties feel just as overwhelming. Just as destablising. Just as nauseating.