Of existence, past and nothingness.

How serpentine is this feeling of existing- I unwind it, slowly . . . If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill up with smoke . . . and then it starts again: "Smoke . . . not to think . . . don't want to think . . . I think I don't want to think. I mustn't think that I don't want to think. Because that's still a thought". Will there never be an end to it?

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exit because I think . . . and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment -it's frightful- if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence.

[ . . . ]

I am, I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think anymore; I am because I think I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh! I flee.

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre.