Some of These Days record

The Some of These Days record is the instrument of Antoine Roquentin’s final, tentative change of direction. In the Brasserie Vezelise, its jazz melody separates itself from the disorder of ordinary existence without becoming an object he can possess or a consolation that dissolves his distress. Listening to it, Roquentin thinks of the people who made and perform the song as having achieved a limited escape from the sheer fact of existing; their work suggests that he, too, might attempt to create something. The record thus leads not to a settled cure for his Nausea, but to the possibility of a novel.

The Record and Its Last Listening

Madeleine, hoping to please Roquentin, holds up the record he likes and asks if he wants to hear it for the last time. He agrees out of politeness rather than eagerness. Its age makes the prospect concrete: it is old even for the provinces, and he expects he will look for it in vain in Paris. Madeleine sets it on the gramophone; as the disc turns, the needle follows its grooves, and the voice singing “Some of these days” will fall silent when it reaches the centre. The record’s impending end gives this listening a particular finality, though Roquentin does not yet know what it will begin for him.

Before the music starts, his attention is sunk in thoughts of Anny, his wasted life, and the Nausea. The objects around him—the dirty glasses, the stained mirror, Madeleine’s apron, and the brasserie’s customers—seem to share the same ugly, heavy reality. That world’s discomfort is familiar enough to feel almost like home. The song introduces a sharp contrast: instead of the muddled suffering that clings to things and thoughts, it offers a suffering shaped into rhythm.

A Form Beyond Ordinary Existence

The saxophone’s four notes make Roquentin ashamed. Their suffering seems exemplary: lucid, rhythmic, and without self-pity. He wishes he could suffer with the same dry purity, yet his own distress remains entangled with warm beer, the stains on the mirror, not being wanted, and the humiliating, bodily weight of feeling. The song does not express sympathy for him. Its beauty is not a compassionate answer to his pain; it turns, self-absorbed and brilliant, apart from the drab intimacy shared by Roquentin, Madeleine, the other customers, and the room.

That separation does not mean the music becomes a thing he can seize. Roquentin imagines that even if he ripped the record from the table and broke it, he would not reach the song itself. The disc, the voice, and the vibrations in the air are material means through which the melody appears, but they are not identical with the form he hears. The music remains beyond its physical carriers; in relation to it, the surrounding existents seem superfluous. The record therefore makes a distinction he cannot otherwise secure: it exists as a material object, while the song seems to escape the contingent existence of the objects and people in the room.

Makers, Performance, and a Moment of Joy

The song also turns Roquentin’s attention away from himself and toward its makers. He imagines the man who wrote it on a hot day in July, in a room under a black heat: sweating, burdened by bills, perhaps troubled by a woman who did not return his feelings. Roquentin does not know whether these details describe the songwriter’s actual life; he constructs them as a possible human origin for the music. What moves him is not an idealized biography but the thought that an ordinary man, amid heat and trouble, made something whose form can outlast and exceed those circumstances.

He asks Madeleine to put the record back once more before he leaves. On hearing it again, he thinks of the songwriter and of the Negress who sings. He calls both of them saved, not because their lives have ceased to be subject to existence, but because their work has, to some extent, washed them of the burden of merely existing. This thought catches him by surprise. He had not been hoping for such a possibility, yet feels something like joy and is afraid that moving might make it disappear. The song’s recurrence changes the scene: the record that had seemed to be playing for the last time now receives a second hearing, and the repeated performance makes a new response possible.

From the Record to the Novel

The musical experience leads Roquentin to ask whether he, too, could try to make something. He does not propose composing music; the medium available to him is a book. Nor does he want to continue writing history. Historical writing concerns what has existed, and he now sees his attempt to resuscitate the Marquis de Rollebon as a mistake: one existent cannot justify the existence of another. He imagines a different kind of book, perhaps a story or adventure, whose form would stand above existence and be beautiful and hard as steel.

That ambition remains uncertain. Roquentin doubts his talent and has never written such a book, although he has written many historical articles. He can picture readers identifying its author as Antoine Roquentin, the red-headed man who frequented cafés, and thinking of his life as he now thinks of the singer’s: as something precious, almost legendary. Writing would not immediately stop him from existing or from feeling that he exists. But once the book was finished, he imagines that some of its clarity might fall across his past, allowing him perhaps to remember his life without repugnance. In this way, the record does not furnish a ready-made justification for Roquentin’s existence. It gives him a model of created form and the tentative prospect of making a work that might alter how he accepts his own past.