He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional liteiary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements’, careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age, and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it. We were arguing on firm ground here. I admired, in theory at any rate, the systematic derangement of the senses, dangerous living, lost souls, all excesses – drink, drugs, and sex. Sartre held that when one has something important to tell the world, it is criminal to waste one’s energies on other occupations. The work of art or literature was, in his view, an absolute end in itself; and it was even – though he never said so, I was sure he believed this – the be-all and end-all of the entire universe. He shrugged disdainful shoulders at all metaphysical disputes. He was interested in social and political questions; he sympathized with Nizan’s position; but as far as he was concerned, the main thing was to write and the rest would come later. Besides, at that period he was much more of an anarchist than a revolutionary; he thought society as it was then was detestable, but he didn’t detest detesting it; what he called his ‘opposition aesthetics’ admitted quite openly the existence of imbeciles and knaves, and even required their presence in the world: if there was nothing to attack and destroy, the writing of books wouldn’t amount to much.