Jean-Paul Sartre

INEZ: One always dies too soon— or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are— your life, and nothing else.

Thursday morning in the library:

Sartre remarked: “I took this hard: I had put all of myself into a book I worked on for many years; it was myself that had been rejected, my experience that had been excluded.”

If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified. It isn’t that my life is rich, or weighty or precious. But I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where? Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins? I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.

Is that what awaits me then? For the first time I am disturbed at being alone. I would like to tell someone what is happening to me before it is too late and before I start frightening little boys. I wish Anny were here.

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.

Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea. And this time it is new: it caught me in a café.

“Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that’s exactly what you’ve never had (remember you fooled yourself with words, you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets adventure) and this is what you’ll never have—and no one other than yourself.”
But Why? WHY?

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

Four o’clock strikes. I’ve been sitting here an hour, my arms hanging. It’s beginning to get dark. Apart from that, nothing in this room has changed: the white paper is still on the table, next to the pen and inkwell. But I shall never write again on this page already started. Never again, following the Rue des Mutilés and the Boulevard de la Redoute, shall I turn into the library to look through their archives.