The Magic of Magritte
A Look at the Mysterious Painter-Philosopher
There are moments when reality makes itself rudely apparent.
We go about our lives not thinking much about the matter around us. Our consciousness is unreflective, all our interactions are merely a means to an ends in the flow state of everyday life.
Sometimes we momentarily wake up to the strangeness of our existence. The flow of everyday consciousness is disrupted. This happens in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea to the protagonist Roquentin.
During one scene, Roquentin is riding a trolley car when he suddenly loses the context of his situation. The buildings outside the window rather than the trolley car itself seem to be moving.
He lays a hand on his seat to ground himself, but he doesn’t feel the seat, he feels its existence. He pulls his hand away and tries to reassure himself that he is on a seat. The word “seat” stays on his lips and does not apply itself to the thing.
The seat, he thinks, could just as well be the bloated belly of a dead donkey. Language has failed. “I am in the midst of things,” he says, “nameless things. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me.”
