Let us consider the waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope-walking by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behaviour seems to us a game… He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch for long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.
Posted March 28, 2012 at 8:31pm in Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre acting cafe fake philosophy playing stiff waiter french
