L'essentiel c'est la contingence

La nausée struck me first, at least as far as I can remember, when I was in kindergarten, in Watertown, South Dakota, on a dreary grey day, as were all days in the winter during that time of my life (or, should I say, as were all days with a few brilliant exceptions during that time of my life; or should I say on a dreary grey day during the winter of my life), and, inside, we were all shepherded into some circle game that involved skipping around the outside of the circle. I’m quite sure that even at that age I was painfully self-conscious, aware of myself as a ludicrous bundle of bones and knobs with a cap of boy’s hair that I never felt to belong to me on top of my head. But the feeling became overwhelming as I took my turn skipping around the circle, heels clicking on the dark green tiles, yes, clicking, because my mom always bought me shoes with funny little heels, and suddenly recognized my own knees flying up at me, bony, covered with my weird spectral mottled skin, and experienced them as completely alien to me. I was undone.

I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?

I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.

What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.

In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.

In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.

Post script:

Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.

Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.

There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.