No one can be completely sure what existentialism is, since its own chief thinkers disagreed about its tenets and many of them denied being existentialists at all.
I didn’t quite glimpse it, but I did decide that I wanted to study philosophy, and especially this strange philosophy of Sartre’s, which I learned was “existentialism”. I even went to a park and tried to see the Being of a Tree. The book inspired me: I played truant from school and tried drifting around my own provincial town of Reading. Indeed it was: I bonded at once with its protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who drifts around his provincial seaside town staring at tree trunks and beach pebbles, feeling physical disgust at their sheer blobbish reality, and making scornful remarks about the bourgeoisie. I just guessed that it would be my kind of book. I didn’t know what was mysterious about being, or what alienation meant – although I was a perfect example of it at the time.
It was the cover that attracted me, with its Dalí painting of a dripping watch and sickly green rock formation, plus a blurb describing it as “a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being”. I became one at 16 after spending birthday money from my granny on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.
