roquentin's epiphany

Another excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea:

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror -- and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exit. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be -- and behind them . . . there is nothing. . . .

I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought -- I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. 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 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 exist 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. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head . . . if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes -- and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.