Nocturne in 19

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The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Soap opera with brains . Yes, I can agree with this. Caring about other people while waatching their little lives and dramas is so much more fulfilling when they prove themselves to have so complex despair behind their everyday actions. It never ends, really. The constant proving to oneself that this life is worthwhile, that the hopes of the past and the dreams of the future won’t go to waste. Mathieu keeps to his belief of freedom, to be capable of anything, no matter what constraints have been laid across his living by emotional bonds and societal dictations and past history. In the end he achieves this freedom, and finds that he no longer believes in it. He has reached the age of reason, when he sees that the ideas that once characterized him can no longer be applied to him, unless he wishes to be a hypocrite. In achieving his freedom, he sacrificed for nothing, a nothing that provides a clean a break from everything that had been forcing him into a situation that was no longer; and for what? He may have found a small satisfaction in not being free, now that he had realized that he was waiting for a moment of a lifetime that would never come. Everyone around him either spins out delusions of the future or chases desires that had died long ago, joining him in his everlasting goal of not sinking into regret and despair. A satisfyingly realistic portrayal of the tightrope walk that daily life really is.

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