If you existed, you had to exist all the way

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of"existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring
finery. I said, like them, "The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feelthat it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence hides itself. It is there,
around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it.

When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was
empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "to be." Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea.

Even when I looked at things, I was miles
from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, 1 foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had
asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then
all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into
existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer.

This veneer had melted,
leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to see,
behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp posts of the bandstand and the Velleda, in the midst
of a mountain of laurel.

All these objects . . . how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the

Mas-queret Fountain sounded in my ears,
made a nest there, filled them with signs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odour.

All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves drift into existence like those relaxed women who burst out laughing and say:

"It's good to laugh," in a wet voice;


they were parading, one in front of the
other, exchanging abject secrets about their existence. I realized that there was no half-way house between

non-existence and this flaunting abundance.

If you existed, you had to exist all the way,

as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep
their pure and rigid lines.

But existence is a deflection.

Jean-Paul Sartre - excerpt from NAUSEA