Sick of It All
‘I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe'
Ginger can negate the nausea of existence, a phenomenon chronicled by French philosopher-novelist J.P. Sartre
It’s anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antispasmodic, antihypertensive, anti-hyperlipidemic, anti-tumor, and analgesic. It also fractures flatulence.
“Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea,” Antoine Roquentin, the dyspeptic protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, writes in his diary. “And this time it is new: it caught me in a café,” he continues, “I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.” Has anyone ever needed ginger, the nausea remedy I’m going to tell you about, more than Antoine Roquentin? I mean, aside from pretty much every person in America these past four years. Let me explain. Roquentin, the French philosopher’s alter ego, is a young writer at work on a biography of a minor eighteenth-century French diplomat, the Marquis de Rollebon. He’s also the proverbial man at loose ends: ambling around, loafing in cafés, hate-watching strangers while contending with bouts of existential malaise he’s named “the Nausea.” Meanwhile, in his diary, which is also the …
