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Sunday, February 19, 2017

A good night to Nausea: letter to Jean-Paul Sartre

Dear M. Sartre,
my French is so bad that you would never have understood.
Your Nausea, i read it as a very young man, i read it several times after.
I assure you: you did well. It nauseates. It is the shared nausea of humanity.
It is not, i repeat, not the nausea of life, of earth, grass, flowers, dogs.
I don't know for sure, my friend may think that i must be stupid and blind
not to feel your nausea all the time. Well, after all you said that we are free
and free to give a meaning to our life if and  as we wish to do. So, i must
inform you just as well as i informed my friend: I have no time to
spend in nausea. It comes, it goes. It is perfectly useless to kneel
in front of the toilet waiting for the next reason to vomit.
I see life as offering a rich travel, dangerous, ending with death of course.
Why should it concern me so much that i cannot think up a meaning
of life itself? What i feel is enough to me because it has to.
I have not been born to think but to live and to be alive.
And would it be true in your opinion that to be a communist was a therapy
against your nausea of existence? Well, maybe it was. I remember, you didn't like
Albert Camus that much. Were you jealous that he saw the abyss , the
loneliness and the absurdity of human existence clearly but without nausea?
I guess you must have  been. A person who could say

"It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies" : you suffered from acrophobia, no?

This is why i will turn my attention to other experiences in my present moment.

My best wishes , wherever you are now,

yours absurdly

Conrad Feder


note:
i my own way i define the nausea in Sartre's book as
the obvious result of total sick Western egocentricity.
there is no way to compare this with Buddhist teachings.
It could have only been written here in Europe, and
this nausea is a very real experience for all of us,
it really should not be our only and our most important 
experience at all: this then should be avoiding the lesson of life
itself, it should be avoiding life.







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