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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausea_(novel)
 La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| Author | Jean-Paul Sartre |
|---|---|
| Original title | La Nausée |
| Translator | Lloyd Alexander; Robert Baldick |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Philosophical novel |
| Published |
|
| Publication place | France |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 248 (Gallimard), 253 (Penguin) |
| ISBN | 978-0-141-19484-4 (Penguin UK edition) |
| OCLC | 8028693 |
Nausea (French: La Nausée) is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel.[1][2]
The novel takes place in 'Bouville' (homophone of Boue-ville, literally, 'Mud town') a town similar to Le Havre.[3] It comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin's growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls "the Nausea", in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. Sartre's original title for the novel before publication was Melancholia.
The novel has been translated into English by Lloyd Alexander as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin[3] and by Robert Baldick as Nausea.[4]
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the
man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and
accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second,
there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by
locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York
of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest
of something.
...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”
―
Here Is New York
“A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."
“Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice
Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima
is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual
wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an
ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary
life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by
something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a
foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity
of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”
―
The Namesake
It’s the birthday of Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri, born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri in London (1967). Her father, a librarian, moved the family to Kingston, Rhode Island, when Lahiri was two. Growing up, Lahiri often felt conflicted between two worlds: that of her parents, who still listened to traditional Bengali songs on a reel-to-reel tape player, and that of her American friends, who watched television and went to the movies. A nervous child who was afraid of sports and public speaking, she found solace in reading. She says: “Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child.” She began writing stories at age seven with a school friend, stealing blank notebooks from the teacher’s supply closet. They wrote stories about orphaned girls, prairies, and girls with magical powers.
She moved to Boston after graduating from Barnard College and worked the cash register at a bookstore. She rented a room in a house and pecked out stories at night on her typewriter. It took eight years and several rejections until her first collection of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, was published (1999). It became an instant best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize (2000).
Potholes offer several cruel but useful effects. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist.
My street is two blocks from an elementary school in one direction and two blocks from a high school in the other. It’s a short and humble road bisecting two larger ones; a quick drive past 11 houses with shallow driveways, like 11 open-faced sandwiches.
Many of us have lived here for decades. From the front porch, we recognize walkers, bicyclists, dogs, and this past school year, a cadre of school-bound scooter riders. We also see a parade of cars starting and ending each day.
Sedate driving on this short street is rare. Cars speed flagrantly. Maybe parents are late for elementary school pickup in the afternoon and don’t want to pay the aftercare program penalty. Maybe adolescents have commandeered their parents’ cars and are living out their vision of casual freedom. Maybe drivers in both directions mean no harm but are simply thinking of something else. The excuse for most bad behavior these days is that it’s only a reflection of our sped-up and thoughtless times.
Because the street is dead straight, acceleration must be tempting, even a little thrilling, like kids attempting wheelies. But cats have died from cars on this block, and I wait with dread for the day a dog breaks loose, and after that, the day a child does.
There are no deterrents. On the neighboring road, speed bump effectiveness has been tepid, and speed limit signs have almost no use. Hollering from the porch doesn’t work, and I’ve thought about standing in the middle of the street, wings out like a condor. I’ve also thought about snapping license plate photos and passing them onto the police, but of course the cars that most need to be identified drive by too quickly to catch.
In the end, as with almost all human behavior, change will boil down to self-interest: not the danger a driver exposes others to, but the risks his speeding runs to himself.
I have done a bit of research into the biomechanics of potholes. They offer several cruel but useful effects. Excessive speed over potholes punctures and flattens tires, of course — or at least, weakens the sidewalls, which causes dangerous bulging in need of immediate replacement. Metal rims can bend or crack on impact. Suspension shocks, struts, ball joints and control arms can snap. And if the car scrapes bottom, exhaust pipes might rupture, and oil pans can crack and leak.
The consequences are both immediate and completely avoidable. At high speeds, damage of some kind is likely (hopefully, damage of all kinds). But if a worried driver eases his way across the minefield with care, risk lessens greatly both to the cars and to any pedestrians with paws or feet. It’s a simple physics lesson about force and deceleration.
New England winters usually bring frost heaves, and there were some gloriously deep potholes along this street for a while. There were the crossing guards who waded fearlessly into traffic with fluorescent red signs, and cars (their drivers no doubt irritated) were forced to go slowly. This spring, after a municipal cleanup, most of the potholes were sealed over, and the crossing guards are gone until fall.
If I ran the town, I would break open the potholes. Nothing in life is worth a mad hurry when so much is at stake. For all the rushing parents running late, the adolescents seduced by a straightaway, the random motorists gunning down the block with exhilaration and wind in their ears, there should be high costs. In the best of worlds, all you who drive like this, they would be exorbitant.
Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist and a contributing Globe Opinion writer.
Feeling out of control is scary for most people, but even more so for adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs).
Living with an alcoholic or addict is scary and unpredictable, especially when youre a child. Trying to control people and situations is a coping strategy that children of alcoholics develop to deal with chaotic and dysfunctional family situations. It is normal and adaptive. In other words, your desire to control everything in your life is an understandable outcome of growing up in an overwhelming and traumatic family environment.
Young children mistakenly think they can control their parents drinking. From an early age, you may have tried to get your parent to stop drinking and behaving in dangerous and embarrassing drunken ways. Children of alcoholics vacillate between frantically trying to control their parents drinking and feeling completely powerless and out of control.
When we try to control other people and situations we attempt to force the outcome we want. We have an unrelenting need to orchestrate everything and everyone in our lives. Things have to be our way or we emotionally unravel and find it hard to cope.
Control issues can show up in many different ways. Some are obvious and some are subtle. They can be as benign as needing our socks to be folded in a particular way or as devastating as bullying our family and friends into doing things that violate their values.
Efforts to feel in control can show up as:
These controlling behaviors cause problems for us as individuals and in our relationships. They put undue stress on us. They cause us to be harsh and critical of ourselves. We feel like we have to be perfect, fix everything, and know how and what to do at all times.
We unfairly project our fear and anger onto others through our efforts to control them. Controlling behaviors reflect our difficulty trusting others and denial of our own feelings and needs to avoid being vulnerable.
Beneath controlling behaviors we find both fear and the grandiose notion that we always know the right thing to do.
Growing up in an alcoholic family, everything felt out of control and we felt helpless. Trying to control people and situations gives us a sense of power, a sense that we wont be victimized anymore. We feel safe when we feel in control. This is why we hold onto the illusion of control so tightly.
To put it simply, it feels downright scary when we give up control. Theres a sense of dread that we feel; a remnant from childhood, an expectation that scary, awful things will happen if we release control.
Children in alcoholic families often become parentified and take on adult responsibilities that their parents have neglected. This heightened sense of responsibility lends itself to our belief that were responsible for fixing other peoples problems and that we need to be in charge.
At the heart of these control issues is difficulty trusting others. In alcoholic families, adults arent always reliable and trustworthy. Theres deep denial of the alcoholism and dysfunction and children are often told that nothings wrong. But somethings very wrong — the alcoholic is busy drinking (or sleeping one off) and his/her spouse is preoccupied with efforts to fix the problems and mitigate the damage done by the alcoholic. This leaves the children confused and emotionally neglected (and sometimes physically neglected and/or abused). When children cant trust their parents, they respond with an intense need to control things themselves.
Surrendering control means we let things happen naturally; we take responsibility for our own feelings and actions, but dont try to force others to do or be what we want. We allow others (and ourselves) to make mistakes and we can accept that things wont always go the way we want, but we can cope while remaining calm and flexible. Instead of using our energy to control things, we can use it to enjoy things!
Children of alcoholics initially try desperately to control their out of control home life, but end up feeling completely powerless and out of control. The truth is that control isnt all or nothing. We can control some things and not others. We can control our thoughts, feelings and behavior, but not what others do or feel. So, while you cant make your parent stop drinking or your spouse get a job, you can decide how you handle these situations. Youre not completely powerless because you can control your feelings and reactions.
Try to stay open to other ways of doing things. Notice your all-or-nothing thinking which tells you that your way is the best and only way. Most of the time, theres more than one decent way to do things. At the same time stay focused on the problems that are truly yours to solve. Codependents and ACOAs want to solve everyones problems; this isnt possible and it often causes us more stress and damaged relationships than its worth.
We dont only have the option of being in control or being out of control. When we stop trying to control other people, we choose to trust that they can make good decisions and if they cant, those arent our problems to solve. Accepting that we cant control everyone and everything is essential to our happiness. As is recognizing that we dont have to be responsible for everyone else and we dont have to burden ourselves with the pressure to always be right and in control. Detaching from other peoples problems isnt uncaring; allowing people to figure things out for themselves is a loving and trusting act.
Giving up trying to control things means you trust that you can cope with whatever life has in store. We all know that most of control is really just an illusion; we cant control other people or Mother Nature or most situations. Freedom is knowing that we have the skills to cope, that were resilient, and that because of our life experiences, we can and will get through the challenges that were facing today.
*****
2017 Sharon Martin, LCSW.
5 years ago, we lost John Lewis, a civil rights activist, longtime congressman, and lifelong fighter for justice. Lewis dedicated his life to creating a more fair and equal world. He marched on the front lines of the civil rights movement in Selma, sat in the halls of Congress, and never gave up on the idea that America could be better.
Now, as we face growing threats to our freedoms, from continued attacks on voting rights to rising authoritarianism, his voice still calls us to action. His words remind us that real change takes courage, persistence, and a whole lot of “good trouble.”
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” – From the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 2020
“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” — During the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, 2019
“Freedom is not a state; it is an act… Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.” — From Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
“Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.” — From Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change
“A democracy cannot thrive where power remains unchecked and justice is reserved for a select few… Peace cannot exist where justice is not served.” — On the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act
“We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time.” — At the House sit-in after the Pulse nightclub shooting, 2016
“Nothing can stop the power of a committed and determined people to make a difference in our society. Why? Because human beings are the most dynamic link to the divine on this planet.” — From Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change
“You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone — any person or any force — dampen, dim or diminish your light… Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.” — From Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
“Sometimes you have to not just dream about what could be—you get out and push, and you pull, and you preach.” — From “Bill Moyers and John Lewis on Marching for Hope,” 2013
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year — it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” — From a 2018 tweet
Let’s honor John Lewis by doing what he did best: showing up with compassion, standing up with courage, and never backing down in the pursuit of justice.
