I read a book called Nausea when I studied abroad in Florence, Italy in 2014. I didn’t like the book, but that was fine, since I read it not for pleasure but to prove to the girl in the flat below us that I was smart. The girl’s name was Rachel. She was nice enough, but she wore enormous wire-framed glasses and a thin-lipped expression that said, “I am not easily impressed.” She declared things in absolute terms, like “I’m from Boston,” and “Any list of the best works from mid-century existentialists must include Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.”
I failed to convince Rachel I was smart, but I did finish the book. I took from it two things: a vague fear of mid-century existentialists and a very sticky idea that I’ll try to share with you. This is the idea:
Nothing ever lives up to its ideal.
Put another way, something is always wrong.
For example, Alli and I are getting ready to head to the beach. I’ve been anticipating this vacation for months. I can picture how it will be. I have a mental image of myself laying on a beach towel, sipping a cold drink and reading some book (not Nausea), enjoying the presence of family and feeling totally and completely at peace.
But this mental image is false. Things will not be this way. In reality, Alli and I will bicker over where we should stick the umbrella, or be bothered by sandflies, or I’ll tramp to the bathroom and get grossed out by the sweat-and-urine-slicked floors. The ideal is clean but impossible. It doesn’t exist.
Another example: Picture a great movie scene. (I’m thinking of the iconic speech in Braveheart, but any scene works.) Now recognize that this scene is a mental image put on screen that could not have taken place in real life. If William Wallace did give some sort of speech, you can bet someone in the crowd was coughing or muttering disinterestedly or picking their nose. Maybe Wallace’s voice cracked on the word “freedom.” Maybe he had to swat a bug or take a bathroom break.
We live in daydreams. We’re always visualizing how things will be or remembering how a moment was, but our mind’s eye can only draw stick-figure sketches of the real world. Nothing matches our mental imagery. Something is always wrong.
This used to nag at me. Sometimes it still does. But there’s a flip side.
The other evening, right around sunset, Alli and I took a walk on the path by the river.
The sky caught fire so that banks of towering cumulonimbus clouds, like castles drifting in heaven, turned gold, pink, deep red, dark blue. In the water a drake made a surprised, human sort of sound, like an old man upset at a football game. A female duck paddled to the bank, trailed by a bumbling line of fuzzy ducklings the size of tennis balls. Cottonwood leaves shivered. Branches cast dancing shadows. Grasshoppers chirped. Behind us rose a dinner-plate moon.
It was too much. I kept swiveling my head between wonders, but I couldn’t catch every change in the light.
I’ve been thinking about lines from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “There are two hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar… there are six million leaves on a big elm. All right, but they are toothed, and the teeth themselves are toothed. How many notches and barbs is that to a world?”
I can picture a Minecraft or Roblox universe where everything is made up of blocks. This would be aesthetically comforting and, emotionally, easier to manage. It would solve the Nausea problem because our mental imagery would match up to that world’s straight lines – no discomforting dissonance. But the block world would have a very shallow beauty.
Instead, we live in a world that is intricate to the point of absurdity. Here, there is always another door in the wall, a false bottom to every floor of beauty. There’s too much; the teeth themselves are toothed. Just when we think we have the full measure of a thing, the light changes, and then we know we’re not limited by the world’s capacity for beauty but by our capacity to recognize it. We can’t catch it all in mental images; the jar of our mind is too small. The best we can do is let the world wash over us with our eyes open.
Could all of this exist without sandflies, sweat, and sticky bathroom floors? I’m not sure. Nausea is a justifiable reaction. So is worship.
