This is what I have been thinking, for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must - and this is all that is necessary - start recounting it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
Jean-Paul Satre, Nausea.
2 comments:
It takes me quite a while to get my head around these quotes and when I comment I have to remember them which I find even more difficult. I like the quote as it (and Im not sure if this is the right way to put it) but it has a kind of poetic um twist i think. It has the main focus of recounting experience and by the repition of the word has that kind of reptatative stance and I guess is once again reiterated within the content. Stories told again and again, living through what has already happened and so what has already happened becomes relived? (this is where i start confusing myself I think!) However, maybe its me being awkward, but the way I read it, it's like Satre's saying that to experience 'true adventure?' we must relive others stories? Which fair enough, there is always a history to our experiences, but to recount a story is not exactly retelling, and relying on ones own memory for details of someone elses let alone a personal experience is full of misinformations and eccentricities that we fabricate? Surely, to keep an open mind, perhaps influenced by others stories, would allow for rich adventure. I feel like that quote places me in a box and opposes the notion of adventure., but there again Im probably going off on a tangent and taking it the wrong way.
I know exactly what you mean sarah - in this way I have somekind of advantage over you because i chose it, I know where its comes from, what lies ahead and what prempted it. For me, I like it because its seems to speak of the subjective nature of memories, and storytelling, and the experience of these. I also get in a right muddle when I think about it for more than a few moments. Further investigation seems also less productive because i cant find my way out! What I was considering when I put this on the blog was more to see how it sat in conjunction with some of the images I intended to use. I'm not yet sure of the scheme I want to use for my blog but several patterens are starting to appear, one of which seems to be the standpoint from which we view these images, little histories, quotes and works. Time works to give us somekind of vantage point over things - a sort of retrospect. I keep thinking of photographs in albums, which act as aide memoirs for old experiences.
This is one of the reasons I also have the Sebald quote earlier on. I also really like his pairing of eye image and quote which you have used on your blog.
Now its me who's gone off on a tangent!
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