All at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface.
Black? The root was not black, there was no black on this piece of wood — there was something else black, like the circle, did not exist. I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black?
I was there, motionless, paralyzed, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it.
How long will this fascination last? I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was entirely conscious of its existence. Still detached from it — since I was conscious of it — yet lost in it, nothing but it.
J.P. Sartre - Nausea
Digital collage was processed using VQGAN, and the output is further processed via Disco diffusion and touched up using Photoshop.
