The Root of the Chestnut Tree*
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I
CANNOT
'"Y that I feel any "<nse of •elief o• satisfaction; on the
contrary, it has left me staggering. But I have achieved my aim. I
know now what I wanted to know; everything that has happened
to me since last January has become clear. The Nausea has not left
me and I do not think it will in a hurry; but it has ceased to be
something I endure; it is not a disease or a passing fever: it is me.
It happened this way. A little while ago I was in the City Park.
The root of the chestnut tree sank into the ground directly under
my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. The name of
things had vanished and with them their significance, the uses to
which they are put, the faint traces men make on their surfaces to
guide them. I was sitting somewhat bent over, my head down, alone
in the presence of that dark and twisted mass, that brute mass of
which I was afraid. Then I had a sudden illumination.
It took my breath away. Never, until a few days ago, had I
had an inkling of what it means to "exist." I had been like other
people, like the folks who walk along the seashore in their spring
clothes. Like them I used to say, "the sea
is
green; that white spot
up there
is
a seagull," but I did not feel that they existed, that the
seagull was an "existing seagull." Ordinarily existence is hidden; it
is here, all around us, in us; it
is
us and you cannot say a word with–
out speaking of it; but you do not touch it. Before, when I thought
I was thinking about it, I could not have been thinking of anything;
my head was a blank, or there was just one word in my head, the
word "being." Or else I was thinking- how shall I put it? I was
thinking of
belongingness:
I said to myself that the ocean belonged
to the category of green objects, or that green was one of the attributes
of the ocean. Even when I looked at things I was a thousand miles
from thinking they existed: I looked upon them as part of the setting.
I took them in my hands, they served me as tools, I anticipated their
ways of resisting me. But all that took place on the surface.
If
any-
*
This is a chapter from the novel
La Nausee .
