Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre wasn't just an offstage character in Monty Python sketches, he lived and wrote. He wrote about words and how they define the world. There are two words in French for 'words', 'les mots',written words, words as a concept, and 'les paroles', spoken words. The one of Sartre's works which was about his life was 'les Mots'. The book which shows us clearly what he means by words defining our world, is 'La Nausée', 'nausea'.

If anyone is still reading by this point, skip this paragraph, it's for one specific person, you know, like the Specific Ocean. Nausea is a first declension noun. Ad is a preposition that takes the accusative case, ergo, declining nausea to agree with ad, we get ad nauseam.

And one, two, three, we're back in the room.
Many serious academics won't have any truck with Sartre because he made a theory that was incomprehensible to most, accessible to all. Heidegger et alia didn't get where they were then by writing anything that anyone lower than God could understand. Sartre did though, in fact he went further, he wrote plays and novels that explored the notion of Existentialism. And it was big, because it answered questions about how people really felt now that human history had reached a point where we could be free of God if we wanted, and about how the war and the lead up to the war had affected them. And there was an irony in that because parts of the Nazi party had adopted the ideas of Heidegger and of Nietzsche to support their master plan.

Sartre was French of course, but he was brought up in Alsace, an area which transitions France and Germany, which has been pulled backwards and forwards between the two countries like a beloved pet in a divorce. So he knew, he understood, and he didn't care about his critics.

Like many people in my age group, I first came across Sartre's writings and ideas in the sixth form at school. Later, I was able to teach several of his texts. Now that I am reading a book about a fictional poet, Mary Swann, I can see the way people can become deeply involved with writers that they have never met, through their works.

What brought this on? A number of threads. A post on a blog that I was reading yesterday about someone's personal atheism, a random comment I made on Sleepy's blog, but mostly, mostly it stuck in my head because we watched the film 'Little Miss Sunshine' last night and Steve Carell, whom I loved in '40 year-old Virgin' but whom I then despised for allowing a pig's ear to be made of Ricky Gervais's classic comedy 'The Office', played a storming role as Uncle Frank and who pronounced Nietzsche's name correctly.

Jean-Paul, je pense à toi.