Life Begins On The Other Side

Spoken by the character Orestes in Act 3 of Sartre's play The Flies (Les Mouches, 1943), a retelling of the Orestes myth staged in Nazi-occupied Paris. For Sartre, despair is not a failure but the necessary moment of recognizing that the world has no inherent meaning apart from what we create — and it is only after fully confronting that emptiness that authentic human existence can begin. The play was approved by German censors unaware of its intended message: Orestes' act of killing the tyrant and accepting full responsibility for it, without guilt or excuse, was Sartre's coded call for French resistance and self-determination.