Nausea

Today's hero does not really exist, which if you if stick with me, will make a lot more sense. He is Antoine Roquentin a 30 year old former adventurer, who has returned from his travels to settle in the (fictional) city of Bouville, France. Today is not really his birthday, but there was not a real life person to fill the hero gap, and so M. Roquentin had to step in to fill the breach. M. Roquentin is the (anti?) hero of Jean Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, which was first published in 1938. He is a loner at heart, but does engage in a bit of people watching just to see how people act. I can feel a great deal of his pain at 40 that he feels at 30. He does not keep in contact with his family (neither do I), and has no friends (I have a few, so guess I am not totally lost). He seemed bored by his interactions with other people, and is a man of few words (another crime of which I have been accused). He is writing a history of some 18th century French politician, but does not seem to making any sort of progress. One of the best lines is "I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes." Of course, very few of us live so alone in today's modern, computer driven, i phone connected, world, but the sense is still there. Objects begin to lose their "reality" for him, and he begins to fear objects as if they were wild beasts. It is a tale of a man in isolation facing the reality of his isolation from a society he does not really want to be a part of anyway, but still feels some connection to. He eventually starts to doubt his own existence at one time wondering if perhaps "he" is just a figment of the imagination. This idea is not as crazy as you think. A year and a half ago I had a foot of my colon removed, and when I was sent home after 12 days in the hospital with some wonderful drugs, I spent a LOT of time in my bed drugged out of my mind on those lovely little pills that made all that pain go away. After a couple of weeks of almost total, drug induced unconsciousness, you begin to wonder, in the few moments you are lucid a day, if all your existence has become a figment of some drug addled fool's imagination. Though it is possible that all of the things we know, this universe, this planet, this country, this state, this city, this street, and this couch, are all just a dream of some sleeping giant. There are great periods of the novel, and many of its ideas that sail gently over my head, but all in all it is a novel we should all read. Even if we can not understand it all, the little comprehension that we obtain is worth the work put into the read. So for examining his existence with a depth of understanding, and thought fullness that I can only dream about, Antoine Roquentin, if you ever really "existed" at all, (this day in 1938 by my own decree-present), you are my hero of the day.