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Riddle #20: Searching for an Event
October 16–November 20, 2023

The text is an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel, Nausea, published in French in 1938 by Editions Gallimard, and then in English in 1949. This translation, by Richard Howard, is from the New Directions edition of 1959.

"Yes, as you remember so well, I carried those enormous books to the attic. There were very few pictures in them, maybe three or four in each volume. But each picture had a page all to itself, and the other side of the page was blank . . . . I had an extraordinry love for those pictures; I knew them all by heart, and whenever I read one of the books, I'd wait for them fifty pages in advance; it always seemed a miracle to find them again. And then there was something better: the scene they showed never had any relation to the text on the next page, you had to go looking for the event thirty pages on."