boyshadow

While reading Sartre’s famous existentialist work ‘Nausea’ (published 1938), I came across the lines below, and thought they would be worth sharing. It is the main character’s description of a succession of notes in a piece of Jazz he hears whilst in his local café. In the scene he is transfixed by everything he perceives around him, and is intensely focussed on even the most inconsequential details of his vision and hearing.

“There’s no melody, only notes, a host of little jolts. They know no rest, an unchanging order gives birth to them and destroys them, without ever giving them time to recover, to exist for themselves. They run, they hurry, they strike me with a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to stop one, nothing would remain between my fingers but a vulgar, doleful sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it; I know few harsher or strong impressions.”