Jean-Paul Sartre On ‘An Odd Moment In The Afternoon’

In Jean-Paul Sartre‘s Nausea, Antoine Roquentin offers us a characteristically morose reflection about a very particular hour of the day:

Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable. [New Directions edition, 2007; pp. 14]

Monsieur Roquentin is right. Three o’clock is a pretty terrible time of day.

Growing up in New Delhi, three o’clock very quickly became associated with the hottest part of the summer afternoon. (New Delhi’s summers boast of temperatures regularly rising to 110-115 degrees Fahrenheit (434-46 Celsius).) Four o’clock, because of its proximity to five o’clock, which signaled the start of the evening (that’s when folks rising from their afternoon siesta drank their restorative teas) conveyed a slightly benign air; two o’clock, because of its proximity to one o’clock, inherited some of its life-giving and nourishing aspects. But three o’clock was equidistant from these temporal locations; it seemed remote, inaccessible, forbidding; it was the time by which the roads were sure to have emptied. The sun beat down; the hot winds blew; exposure was foolhardy. Best to hunker down at home and ride out the storm.

When I moved to the East Coast of the United States in 1987, I experienced the sharply diminished daylight of this northern latitude in my first fall, when the clocks were set back from the Daylight Savings Time I had been enjoying on my arrival in August. Now, three o’clock was again a zenith of sorts, but a rather depressing one. I could sense the weak, angular rays of the sun were doing little good against the encroaching cold, and I knew that by four o’clock, the dimness would be sharply pronounced. Night would follow all too soon. The fall and winter evenings where when the winds sharpened; three o’clock now became the last brief station of respite before the misery began. And because I was never much of a night owl, given to working late into the night, three o’clock also signaled to me that time was running out on opportunities to be productive. I do not think it is a coincidence incidentally, that Roquentin offers us these thoughts on Friday, 2nd February–a winter afternoon. All too often, like Roquentin, “I would know in advance the day was lost.” Though, unlike him, I did not ever think that “I shall do nothing good, except, perhaps, after nightfall.”

As may be evident from my notes above, I associate moods–almost personalities, if you will–with times of the day. Three o’clock has always had a bit of a hostile air to it. In my childhood summers, it evoked fear; in my adult winters, it signals a particular kind of despondency and melancholia. There is, however, a silver lining in all of this. Now that I’m a father, three o’clock has come to signal to me that time when, on the days that I work at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Library in Manhattan, I must put away my books, sit down for my afternoon meditation session, and on completing it, head to the subways to take a train back to Brooklyn and pick up my daughter from daycare.

Sometimes, I suppose, there still some things you can get done after that dreaded afternoon hour.