Jean Paul Satre

I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.

If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith that it was nothing, just an empty form which attached itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature.

And then all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost it’s harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff on things, that root was steeped in existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked with a frightening obscene nakedness.