10.10.2005

here's to adventure

"for the most banal to ever become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc. etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk alot of this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time."

-Sartre, from "Nausea"

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