Nausea

The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning—this is its self-defining cause—and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.

Suffering is the origin of consciousness,” Dostoevski wrote

The strangest thing is that I am not at all inclined to call myself insane, I clearly see that I am not: all these changes concern objects. At least, that is what I’d like to be sure of.

Why is it not otherwise? Why is it at all? What is this is-ness? Isn’t it simply nothing, or rather Nothingness, the unknowable, indispensable Void? What could be more absurd, “non-rational,” meaningless? The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning—this is its self-defining cause—and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.

is the feeling of being confronted by a bare existence.

like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters.

"Suffering is the origin of consciousness,"

How I love to read my name on envelopes

“A crowd is untruth,” Kierkegaard repeats with choric insistence. Only in the self can the drama of truth occur.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.