Hell Is Other People

I’ve often thought of paying someone skilled at needlepoint to sew Jean Paul Sartre’s salty phrase “Hell is other people,” so that I could pin it to the door of our apartment.

Now, why would I feel that way? I’m going to be optimistic and assume that most people with even a modicum of familiarity with the species inaptly named homo sapiens on planet Earth would have some appreciable understanding as to why someone might feel well represented by that phrase. Certainly, anyone who has dealt with the U.S. healthcare system, spent time in a sports arena, stood in line to order a latte, driven a car, tried hard to make ends meet on a kitchen table, flown on a passenger jet with a toddler kicking the back of your seat or watched an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians would – at the very least - excuse such blunt acerbity, if not find it relatable, and chalk it up to the inhospitable moods of people who pay attention to things.

A video catches my attention. An 81-year-old woman, arrested by Metropolitan police for silently sitting in Parliament Square, London, with a sign reading, “I oppose genocide,” is flanked by two female police officers guiding her to what I would have to assume was a police van. The woman was extremely frail, and could barely walk. Another story, just minutes later, catches my attention: Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, was briefly banned from Musk’s social media platform X, due to its posts accusing Israel and the United States of committing genocide in Gaza. Kafka, on his best day, couldn’t make this shit up.

So yeah. One might say these are the end times. One might also condemn humanity for its chronically petulant violence. But I oversimplify: “hell is other people” has layers of meaning that are surprisingly deeper than raising a middle finger to humanity. Sartre was not suggesting that people are inherently evil. The phrase comes from a play he wrote called No Exit.

No Exit takes place in hell, which is a room appointed with Second Empire furniture, three sofas and a bronze sculpture. Three people – a man and two women – share the room with one another. All are tortured by guilt and remorse. This is where hell comes in. The hell of hell. They torture one another, not just by judgements they make on one another, but by judgements they make on themselves. They implore one another for validation, affirmations that their actions on earth were defensible, justifiable, if not actually noble in some instances. They go in circles. Tempers flare. Alliances are formed. A sexual tension emerges. The emotional pitch rises, subsides, then flares up again with renewed vigor, as additional layers of complexity and maddening ambiguity are added to the grand guignol. At one point, the man – a deserter from the army who is executed by firing squad – opens the door of their room, which until then had been locked. He’s free to walk out. But doesn’t. He can’t. He doesn’t know why. But he can’t. And that’s when he arrives at the realization that hell isn’t filled with devils with pitchforks. Hell is other people.

Existence precedes essence. Why is that? There are no prescribed roles. We enter life without a script. We make our own meaning. It’s all invention. We make shit up. A combination of lungs, vocal folds, and breath create worlds. Words make worlds. Here I sit, pressing bells and buttons innumerable. Some of them glow. Some of them throb. If this act becomes tedious, please alert me, and I’ll refund your attention. I’ll package it in a box with lots of bubble wrap. Attention is a precious thing and shouldn’t be wasted. Protocol calls for a solution. My recommendation is to build a scow and float down the Meuse River à la Arthur Rimbaud, drunk on the effluvium of life. Delirium is neither a turnstile nor an unction. It’s a fantasia. It’s an outcome, a natural development. The plant fondles the water from the pump. The thunder loosens its tongue. We’re efficient beginners. All of us. It’s the end that is difficult. The water spreads into an estuary. And the mind joins its rhythms with the wings of an albatross.

Is the end, in fact, the beginning of a journey? It is if you believe there’s a soul. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. So it makes sense something of our being would continue. Maybe not in a recognizable form, or a surviving ego, a sense of selfhood, but a diffuse energy, an impalpable aura, adrift in space until some inexplicable event channels our energy into another form of being. This is me being metaphysical. And wishful. Deep down I’m more empirical. Even in bodily form I was never actually me, but a constellation of cells and organs that developed billions of years ago and evolved into the bipedal creature I am today, lying on the bed with a cat on my lap listening to Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn play “Texas Flood  Jam.” My identity has been theater all along, as anyone’s, as Hamlet or Ophilia, as Napoleon or Cleopatra, as Dolly Parton or Etta James, playing out an impromptu script in a world nobody really understood, except frogs and Komodo dragons. And I’m not sure about them.

I agree with Nietzsche: without music, life would be a mistake.

And I wonder, has anyone composed a song called “Hell Is Other People?”

I’ll bet it kicks ass. And makes everybody in the room do a wang dang doodle.

And jump in a drug to paradise.