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Inspired by his dear friend Sylvia’s adventures of last week, Jean-Paul Sartre sets out to answer a simple question: is alcoholism a humanism?

There is no exit. The Gaze, the eternal struggle of seeing oneself as an object in the world of others’ consciousness, is upon me. Or perhaps people are just staring because I wear a turtleneck. Humanité.

My friend Chad, a brother of this fraternity, spots me as he passes by.

“Hey man, glad you could come out. I’m gonna grab a drink, do you want anything?”

“Oui. A cabernet sauvignon or even pinot noir would do.”

“Uh…yeah, I’ll get you a Natty.”

He disappears into the writhing mass of bodies. Young women are flexing their behinds furiously. Perhaps they are convulsing from the revelation that God is absence. God is the solitude of man. Or they are in their death throes, consumed in happy agony by the futility of Existence. We are all slaves to the mort inévitable.

There is a young woman across the room laughing, with her blood-red mouth wide like the void. I will woo her. I approach her.

“Even if absolute beauty – the absolute union of being and consciousness – cannot be apprehended, the irréel, the unreal, is beautiful,” I say, leaning against the wall with a mournful expression. I am always frowning, so I only need to look a little gloomier than usual. I look into the distance. If only I had a cigarette from which to take a drag.

“…Is that supposed to be a pick-up line?”

All human actions are equivalent and all are, on principle, doomed to failure.

“Woo!!!” Another young woman shrieks into my ear as she careens into the crowd.

Woo. How bourgeois.

Hell is other people.

“I actually just broke up with my boyfriend, so I kind of just want to do my own thing,” the original young woman, my torturous nymph, says. “Hope that’s okay.”

“Love is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which one abandons, all which one gives, one enjoys in a higher manner through the fact that one gives it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives. To love is to lie,” I say reassuringly.

She begins to cry. I flee.

Chad finds me. “How’s it going, dude?”

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”

“Jesus, do you talk to your mom like that? Here, try this.” He hands me a pot brownie. Chad is indeed my frère. Perhaps not all Man is anguish, for I have not even seen Camus, the nauseating jock, here. Ah, Jean-Paul, maybe you should not stress so much. Life begins on the other side of despair.

Sartre-pooch via Shutterstock