In Sartre’s book The Nausea the protagonist, a sad Antoine Roquentin, experiences an unsettling nausea at the moments when he sees the world, and the things within it, as they really are; undefined, otherworldly, maddeningly beyond. I’m not Sartre, and hardly think life is so sad. But, I do think that traveling to a foreign world shares some of the wild excitement with the nomanilism that Sartre tried to draw out in his book. It never lasts too long though. At a certain point, the ecstatic aura of newness and open possibility disappeared for me, like a drape had been lifted from Seoul, and the dulling carpet of routine was inserted in its place. In other words, I’m no longer having frightening dreams of alien birds shaking my cohorts into overwhelming bouts of nausea and fatigue. To my own loss. Perhaps the duty of the good life, or at least the adventurous life, is to re-find that excitement, that terrifying nausea, of feeling an utterly wonderful unboundedness.
