Two decades with Sartre’s Nausea
As my car approached Bole International Airport one recent morning, a jetliner roared low across the open sky. Its wingspan seemed to cover the heavens, its tail embroidered with the Ethiopian tricolor. For a fleeting moment, the white bird hovered above the field before vanishing into the unseen runway.
The scene unfolded in uncanny harmony with the opening verse of Barbra Streisand’s Woman in Love playing through my speakers:
Life is a moment in space
When the dream is gone, it’s a lonelier place…
A melancholic lyric, it captures the futility of life—our loves, fears, and passions—set against the immensity of time and space. No matter how vital our concerns seem, they are reduced to insignificance in the continuum of eternity. But what does this conflicting reality mean? How can the weight of a human life be minimized to vanity?
This tension—between meaning and meaninglessness—was at the heart of the French public mood after World War II, when citizens struggled to rebuild their shattered world. They were forced to confront the fragility of their sense of order, predictability, and control.
In postwar France, it was captured most vividly by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose works gave voice to a society disoriented by conflict and stripped of certainties about what it means to live in a normal, controllable world.
Sartre’s 1941 novel Troubled Sleep chronicled this rupture, while his earlier work Nausea—written just two years before German tanks entered Paris—introduced me to the unsettling depths of his existentialist philosophy. Ifirst encountered Nausea more than two decades ago, and it still shapes the way I view myself and the world. Oddly, for a book that altered my perspective so deeply, I can scarcely recall its plot. But that, perhaps, is the point. Sartre was not interested in storytelling for its own sake. His characters and settings were vehicles—mere instruments to transport the reader into the disquieting landscape of existentialist thought. The novel’s diary-like structure frustrated me at first rereading lines, paragraphs, and pages, searching in vain for a coherent plot. I could consume a thousand pages of James Clavell’s Shogun in two weeks, yet Sartre’s 250 pages took me a year and a half.
But the struggle itself was formative. Only later—through rereading, exploring Sartre’s biography, and studying existentialism more broadly—did the novel begin to make sense.The novel was never meant to be a conventional narrative—it was a vessel for a worldview.
My attempt to tackle Sartre’s more imposing philosophical treatises, however, was less successful. Written in dense, academic language, they sent me repeatedly back to the dictionary, only to find that the definitions themselves led to even more obscure terminology.
By the time I finished reading Nausea in 2001, it had become my handbook for life—and even the subject of my second article for The Sun, a now-defunct paper that had once published my reflections on jazz and Louis Armstrong. I was just 24, an unlikely commentator on Sartre, but the editors humored my obsession. The piece ran with a grainy photograph of Sartre, pince-nez perched on his nose, a pipe dangling from his lips, and a faint trail of smoke curling upward. I confess I may have touched up the photocopy, exaggerating the smoke for effect.
For 23 years, my copy of Nausea remained one of my most treasured possessions, alongside an old paper copy. Its loss was devastating. I had left the book in my car for a few days, and it vanished—a mystery that, in a twist of irony, felt existential in itself. I turned over every possibility, retraced every step, but the book was gone. Eventually I asked my brother in the United States to order me a replacement on Amazon. I remember waiting in the arrivals parking lot at Addis Ababa airport, eager to collect it from a traveler he had entrusted. But the messenger forgot, and my frustration mounted. It took nearly two weeks, several failed attempts at contact, and the help of intermediaries before I finally held a new copy in my hands.
Sartre, of course, left more than one book behind. Over his long career he produced not only fiction and philosophy but also works of fierce political engagement. In his later years he embraced Marxist ideas, criticizing the Algerian war, imperialism, and racial injustice. His political optimism, radical by Western standards, was received with suspicion, though his intellectual authority was such that even his critics were forced to respect him. At the height of the Cold War, he joined street protests and traveled to Cuba, where he marched with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. His rebellious activism was tolerated—interpreted as humanism rather than dogma—precisely because of his stature. When he was once arrested during a protest, President Charles de Gaulle ordered his release with the remark: “You don’t arrest Voltaire.”
It is difficult to overstate Sartre’s role in reanimating postwar European thought. Existentialism gave coherence to a shattered world, helping societies torn apart by conflict to reassemble their social, moral, and intellectual fabric.
On a personal level, I owe much to Sartre’s vision. His mantra—“Man is condemned to be free”—has guided me through challenges. It helped me rise from psychological despair and confront life with dignity. His insistence that “existence precedes essence” shows our ability and right to make our choices and define our reality and perception of life.
Sartre never sought to be glorified or made into an icon; he famously refused the Nobel Prize in 1964, unwilling to bind himself to institutions he believed were steeped in false assumptions.
In that refusal, as in his philosophy, Sartre’s life mirrored his literature. Like Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Nausea, who found liberation beneath the chestnut tree, much like the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, Sartre himself discovered freedom in defiance. Sartre’s lesson was not that freedom is a curse, as the word “condemned” suggests, but that it is a truth hidden in plain sight: a blessing disguised as burden.
For me, that revelation remains. Sartre did not hand me freedom, but he showed me it was always mine to claim.
BereketBalcha holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Addis Ababa University (AAU) and a Diploma in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management from Addis Ababa Commercial College/AAU. His extensive professional background encompasses decades of experience in the aviation industry in diverse roles, complemented by a two-year engagement at the Ethiopia Insurance Corporation. He can be reached at [email protected])
Contributed by Bereket Balcha