  Sartre, on the other hand, insists on the “disgusting”, “nauseating” aspect of a world reticent to meaning, order and beauty. His first novel, Nausea, painstakingly chronicles this ontological disgust towards the strangeness of the world. A proffered hand becomes “a big white worm,” a glass of beer a hostile partner whose “gaze” the hero attempts to avoid for half an hour; a pebble on the beach reveals the “nausea” that is communicated from the world “through the hands.” Even here, however, aesthetic experiences trigger some exceptional moments in which the hero manages to escape ontological ‘nausea’. This occurs, for example, when the novel’s main character suddenly hears a jazz song in a café, which, like a “band of steel,” points to a different time beyond the drudgery of the everyday (Sartre 1938, 21–23).