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SURROUNDED_BY_STORIES

                                     December 15, 2011


A passage I marked with a tab at
some point in the past, on p.39                             NAUSEA
of my trade paper edition of
Sartre's "Nausea":

         "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."
                                                         TOYING_WITH_TRUTH
         "But you have to choose: live or tell."


  Well, this sort of thing always
  get my back up: I don't think
  fiction and reality are
  necessarily in opposition.
                                               QUOTE_OF_QUOTES

  For example, trying to live your life
  "as though it were a story" might easily         "Driving force"?
  be the driving force of your life, and
  it's no worse a motivation than many             We used to talk
  another. Or not obviously so...  Though          about "the mainspring
  there are a lot of questions about what          of your existence"
  that might mean.                                 back when mechanical
                                                   watches were hot.
     And just to be hypocritical,
     I'm also the kind of person                   I'm not sure there's
     who gets annoyed with people                  any modern analog.
     who appear to be trying to                    "That was the voltage
     do "dramatic dialog", just                    adapter of his existence".
     like their favorite soaps.
                                                         (The wall wart
                                                         of his existence?)
But then, Sartre isn't really arguing
along any of those lines, he's not really
dissing fiction (in this piece of
fiction), he's talking about a related
issue (*many* things are related issues):

   spontaniety vs. self-consciousness.

He claims you can either live and be
engaged with life or you can step
back and narrate the tale of what's
happening.

   Now, as it happens I don't
   think this is quite right     And perhaps neither does Sartre...
   either.                       these are the thoughts of a
                                 character in a novel, and a
   It's a really common          character in flux, at that.
   fear among young
   intellectuals:                On the page before he's bemoaning the
                                 lack of adventure in his life story:
   Has my slow, plodding
   intelligence socially              "I'm so happy when a Negress
   crippled me, does it               sings, what heights could I not
   make it impossible to              reach if my own life were the
   relate to the relaxed,             subject of the melody?"
   natural "spontaneous"
   mass of humanity?                                NAUSEA

                                         And the close of the novel, he
                                         resolves to begin writing an
                                         adventure story...
      SPONTANEOUS_COMBUSTION
                                                   HARD_AS_STEEL


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