minecanary reblogged
minttrope-deactivated20150608
These are secretaries, office workers, shopkeepers, people who listen to others in cafes: around forty they feel swollen, with an experience they can’t get rid of. Luckily they’ve made children on whom they can pass it off. They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom. Convenient past! Past handed out of a pocket! little gilt books full of fine sayings. “Believe me, I’m telling you from experience, all I know I’ve learned from life.” Has life taken charge of their thoughts? They explain the new by the old—and the old they explain by the older still, like those historians who turn a Lenin into a Russian Robespierre, and a Robespierre into a French Cromwell: when all is said and done, they have never understood anything at all…You can imagine a morose idleness behind their importance: they see the long parade of pretences, they yawn, they think there’s nothing new under the sun.
Nausea by Sartre