Link Oct 1

Carry On

Adam Curtis: 'Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist.'
Adam Curtis: ‘Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist.’

Crack Magazine has a new interview up featuring author and culture critic Nathalie Olah with filmmaker Adam Curtis. Pound for pound, Curtis is one of the most disarming, off-putting, and original thinkers of his generation.

In the old days – and this is not nostalgia, I’m just noting – when you were part of a church, a trade union, a political party or revolutionary movement, you felt that what you did would go on beyond you. Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist. 

Adam Curtis
Filmmaker

La Nausée

Aug 19
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.

It’s hard to love Nausea but easy to see why it’s a seminal work. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist (?), is insufferable. He suffers through life, disgusted with his existence and existence around him. He wallows in the mundanity of being alive, and we get to (have to?) do it with him. Next to nothing happens as he moves from library to cafe, painfully detailing the world around him.

Which is the point. What makes it instrumental is that you feel seen. From the first person, a number of times, Sartre’s descriptions, asides, and observations via Roquentin are the same thoughts I’ve had and that, most likely, you’ve had. In a well-examined life, it is inevitable one would arrive at the paradox of being. And having experienced the void of what it means to be alive, the use of “nausea” to detail its procession from nowhere to comprehensive seizure is unerring.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that is all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been traveling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: You never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. … The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you being to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

Jean-Paul Sartre