No entrance

No entrance
by David Benjamin

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

PARIS — Yesterday, coming up the stairs in our 17th-century no-elevator building, I paused wearily on the 108th step. It wasn’t just a matter of fatigue. I was gripped by a deep and bone-chilling ennui that made me question whether I ever wanted, in my whole miserable, squandered, iniquitous life, to climb the last three steps to our squalid and sparsely furnished maid’s-quarters garret in this unsavory corner of the Sodom & Gomorrah of Western Europe.

This isn’t my usual attitude, so I hastily searched my psyche for clues to a sudden overwhelming heartsickness that seemed to require that I fling myself down the stairs, scrambling my brains on each unyielding oaken step on route to my insensate death in the cobbled courtyard five floors below. It was the ghost — it had to be! He had crept in when the janitor flung open all the outer doors to swab the flagstones — of Jean-Paul Sartre.

OK. Maybe Camus, or Gide, even Robbe-Grillet. Heck, maybe all the way from Japan, shadowing my wife like an ethnic specter, it was Mishima, imitator of the Paris existentialists so slavish that he was the first (and only) Francophile to kill himself over the voluptuary decadence of postwar Tokyo. Clearly, some unseen force had thrown me into an existentialist funk. Probably Sartre. He used to teach high school in the neighborhood.

My unexpectedly tortured mind, as I froze on the staircase holding the groceries, asked “Why go on?” Go home, three more steps and what will greet you? The same thankless scribbling in the same cheaply furnished loft, its walls streaked with the same Parisian sunlight playing on the face of Hotlips — same wife cooking the same remarkable meals in the same cramped kitchen. Were I to complete this redundant, changeless ascension of 111 exhausting steps, I would be surrounded as always with the same bookcases jammed and stacked with the same books, same titles, same dead authors, half unread, some of which I’ll never read. And I see myself as dead as Sartre — I seem to have Sartre’s face! — as the world leans over the lip of my grave to ask, why so many books? You didn’t even read ‘em all! And they were mostly fiction! Nobody reads fiction anymore. Self-help! That’s where the market is. And this dead doofus, they’ll say as they toss dirt on my coffin, couldn’t even help himself up the last three steps!

Sartre probably had a hell of a time getting up the steps. That’s why he crept into my mind and filled it with existential irresolve. As I wallow in this vale of spiritual nausea, my depression swells with the realization that I could not explain to anyone under that age of 60 my existentialist symptoms — because nobody understands the word anymore.

Maybe nobody ever did. I was reading existentialists when I was 16 and I had little idea what these grim-thinking frogs were getting at. Nowadays, I don’t read “existential” unless it’s paired with “threat.” The news seethes with “existential threats.” But this dread peril is not — as I might have expected when I was 16 — tickets to a three-hour rendition of Krapp’s Last Tape with no intermission scheduled and the closest toilet across the street in an Alsatian brasserie.

No, nowadays, an “existential threat” is a foreign policy crisis. It’s a hellish scenario in which, for example, fifty ISIS zealots cross the Atlantic on a Kon-Tiki reed boat to behead the Statue of Liberty with iPhone-activated IEDs. No longer does “existential” mean Malraux leaning across a table at the Polidor from Ferdinand Céline, arguing the point or pointlessness of mankind’s fate as he plows ruts and builds monuments on this dying ball of maggoted manure that we call Earth. Existential’s just a newsword now, that means “real and scary.”

Maybe they’re right. Sartre’s ghost, clutching my soul with icy fingers on a staircase on rue St. Séverin is pretty real and scary. As I writhe in the grip of existential horror, I marvel at the stubborn curmudgeonism Sartre was able to muster up while living one of the 20th century’s most cerebral and sociable public careers. He had survived the war and he resided cozily in the world’s most favored and glorious city, in an era when money was pouring in from tourists, GIs and the Marshall Plan. He rose to celebrity in an era when a faithless playwright/philosophe could still be fashionable. He was the Strindberg of the mid-century jet set.

He dined ‘round midnight at La Coupole, between Simone Signoret and Simone de Beauvoir, with Yves Montand across the table. He had his own corner at Les Deux Magots. They put up his statue at the Rosebud, where Camus and Ionesco, Truffaut and Jean Renoir would drop by to pay for his pastis. He was seen, here, there, across the continent — cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the bitter trace of a sardonic smile on his lips — with Genet and Cocteau, Matisse and Picasso, Piaf and Brel, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, Arthur Miller and Marilyn. Didn’t I see his photo with Audrey Hepburn, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt?

Staring at my last three steps, I wonder. How could a man who looked into the smoldering eyes and touched the hand of Eartha Kitt not be thrilled with life forever after? I spent two hours in her front row, when she was 70 years old, at the Café Carlyle and I wanted to take dance lessons, steal diamonds for her, pour her a bath of champagne, suck on her toes and drink from her navel.

So ended my funk, with memories of Eartha. I climbed the stairs, found her among my CDs, played “C’Est Si Bon” Sartre’s ghost crumbled at the first husky note. He enfolded me in his wispy arms, smiling that defeated smile that no longer convinced me of its sadness.

I discovered that sweet, pretentious Jean-Paul is an even worse dancer than me.