day forty-two

today my Brazilian friend gifted me with a paragraph from Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre:

“The best thing would be to write down events day by day. To keep a diary to see clearly. Not to miss the nuances, the little things, even if they look like nothing, and above all to classify them. It is necessary to determine precisely the extent and nature of this change.
For example, this cardboard box that contains my inkwell. One should try to say how I saw it before and how I see it now. Well, it is a rectangular parallelepiped, it stands out from — too bad, there is nothing to say about it. That is precisely what must be avoided: one must not want to see anything unusual where there is nothing. I think that’s the danger of keeping a diary: you build up everything, you lie in wait, you constantly force the truth. On the other hand, it is certain that at any time — and especially with this box or any other object — I can get that feeling from the day before yesterday again. I must always be ready, otherwise it will slip through my fingers again. One must not do anything, but rather record everything that has happened, carefully and in all details.” (this is actually a machine translation from a German translation of the book, but anyway)

it’d be preposterous to think that I can write anything more interesting or meaningful today, so that’s it then