In honor of the holiday, I present to you: “Planes, Trains, and Nausea”, in which the part of Neil Page is played by Jean-Paul Sartre. Happy Thanksgiving.

Del Griffith: “So what business you in, Neil Page?”
Neil: “I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don’t want to think any more, I am because I think that I don’t want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!”

Del: “You want to hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I’m an easy target.”
Neil: “Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe.”

Neil: “Del, why did you kiss my ear?”
Del: “Why are you holding my hand?”
Neil: “Where’s your other hand?”
Del: “Between two pillows.”
Neil: “What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.”

Neil: “He says we’re going the wrong way.”
Del: “Oh he’s drunk! How would he know where we’re going?!”
Neil: “I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”

Neil: ”Are you trying to start a fight?”
Del: “No I’m simply stating a fact that’s all. You fidget with your nuts a lot!”
Neil: “I feel as though I could do anything. For example, stab this cheese knife into the Self-Taught Man’s eye.”

Neil: “No one was home. Probably at my daughters Thanksgiving pageant.”
Del: “You missed it. I’m sorry. Those are the precious moments too. They don’t come back again.”
Neil: “My memories are like coins in the devil’s purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.”

Del: “I don’t have a home. Marie died eight years ago.”
Neil: “She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the odor of violets given off by a decomposing body. I’m going to leave, I’m going to take my train. But behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.”

Marathon lady: “How may I help you?”
Neil: “I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon. I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.”
Marathon lady: “I really don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.”
Neil: “It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there’s no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns…It goes, it goes … and there’s no end to it. It’s worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.”
Marathon lady: “May I see your rental agreement?”
Neil: “Can you justify your existence then? Perhaps one day, thinking about this very moment, about this dismal moment at which I am waiting, round-shouldered, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I might feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: ‘It was on that day, at that moment that it all started.’ And I might succeed – in the past, simply in the past – in accepting myself.”