"Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines. There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warm living body of the night."
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.
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Fools, said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence"
You've been working so hard all day won't you take your rest
You 've been driving my blues away
Now it is my turn
Come climb beneath my wings
Sweet child it may not be for long
Well I may be a-drinking hard
Like a fish that swims
And I could be riding high
Like a floating cloud
And if the rain does fall
Sweet child I would not let you drown
Well, I would not care to see untruth in your eyes
I would not care to know
Where your heart does lie
I've tried to trust my heart
But my eyes are failin' me
Sweet child come to me now
Let me take your hand
Well I do not know you well yet I've tried so hard
Through four and twenty years
Sweet child, I still don't understand
Well, I've heard there are great men
Who could save our soul
With kind and gentle hearts
And love is their goal
I really want to know
Sweet child, who could shoot them down
And I've a-thought about a man
Who does sing his life
Who sheds his tears upon every mortal soul
And I wonder does he yearn
Sweet child, for death to come for him
And I once did see a child, she did sit and cry
Where has the pretty flower in the darkness gone?
In summer you shall see
Sweet child, I guess it won't be long
Won't you lay yourself down and rest
Let your mind relax
Won't you cuddle into the night
I will guide your path
Well, I may not be here long
'Cause I got a feeling to be gone
