Existentialists are wussies

You heard me, Sartre. Suck it up.
Looking out my library window onto an acre of flat white snow bounded by a swamp, I could argue that this environment is exactly the negative of Sartre's France in Nausea. The lack of stimulation in this scene throws every piece of sensory data into stark relief, making the sweep of a hawk's wing full of meaning and emotional response.

I understand and empathize with the narrator of Sartre's masterwork. The sheer horror at the discovery that flesh is empty, that the sensations of the world are forced upon one through these globulous, slimy, and grossly earthy senses-- this is not new to me. I cannot remember a time when I did not have moments of vertigo from simply being in my body. I understand the compulsive feeling that I cannot move a finger, swallow, or speak because any motion would solidify this prison. I get it. It's the terror of reality.

But there is more than terror to be found here. If you can become determined to experience the overwhelming feeling of moving your head--experience it to the full, experience the fear as fear-- you are identifying part of yourself with the universe around you. Be nauseous. Be afraid. Be disgusted. Be human. This sensation will be replaced by others. Experience them also. The trap of existentialism as practiced by so many is to neglect the experience of change by refusing to experience the change itself.

If when writing in a stream of conciousness way as though Faulkner was looking over your shoulder and sounds pour into your head impossibly loud though nothing is nearby you cannot grasp it, it slides away and the emptiness replaces it, yawning with its great red wet mouth velvet so that no sensation escapes, listen. Listen to the breath held for that moment and in letting your mind wander stop to examine where your mind has gone.

In other words, existentialism is great and allows a freedom we rarely experience to--well--experience things as they happen. But the unexamined life is not worth living. And if you go there, you might as well be nihilistic and give up.

So if you're feeling lost and alone in the sense-filled city, come out to a plain of white, where the white sky is interrupted by a single curve of brown. Then you can understand "alone" and rejoice in it.