Jean Paul Sartre writes about now; about here: what he is experiencing and feeling at any given moment; and most intriguingly, what the objects around him ‘feel’ and project and demand. He is ‘present’ as we would now say, watching and trying, very hard, to capture the essence of being human, of existing in an environment from moment to moment. There is a wonderful slowing down to his work, but also an experiencing up.

(When I arrive home from my weekly business trips, I am forced to slow down, to ease my pace and respect my thoughts. My town is not obsessed with the next business plan and who made a lot of money off an A Round; it is not obsessed with who you know, and how they know who else you should know, and why their plan is ground-breaking and ‘disruptive’. Rather, it encourages talking and holding hands and laughing and watching waves roll by and wondering why it is, and we are.)

There is a gut attraction to existentialism and its singular co-creators, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – their ceaseless attempts to live in the moment and make the most of freedom and choice. This is not easy. We are bombarded with distraction, with duties and commitments, doors and fences. We feel constrained. And yet there is a mystery to life, every moment of every day – the shifting personality of familiar objects; the comic smallness of our bodies and abodes as we look up to the sky; the nightly dreams that feel more essential than our waking world.

(My coffee cup is large and solid to touch; warm when first held, the white foam floating lazily on the surface; then gradually cooler, more brown and staining the inside in random striations as it recedes sip by sip. And eventually the ceramic is dead cold, the cup smaller, less attractive; the coffee is gone . . . like the initial comfort)

Today we dissect personalities, and attack their inconsistencies (mostly from the safe distance of a smartphone and ‘social network’, itself a redundant and increasingly ironic term), But of course all of us are inconsistent. Life is inconsistent. And if you live in the moment and truly absorb your surrounding, you find contradiction upon contradiction. Just like Sartre: who embraced communism after the chaos of WWII, then disavowed the same; celebrated Albert Camus, then publicly disavowed him; endured the humiliation of a German prison, then advocated political violence. All of it made sense to him, then none of it. And yet he never failed to take up the pen and record his experience to the best of his human ability.

(The coffee is gone. But not really. It lingers in my mouth, traveling through my body, impacting my energy and perceptions. And then it is in my mind, and soon on the screen in front of me; a thought, an impression that is more than the moment I experienced it. Sartre may be gone, but of course he is not. Alive as ever; a latte that never cools).

– by MJB