Sartre + mescaline = lobsters

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters — which he sometimes referred to as crabs — Gerassi’s account offers startling new details of the philosopher’s descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.

“Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he says in Gerassi’s new book, Talking With Sartre. “They followed me in the streets, into class ... I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’ I would say, ‘Okay guys, we’re going into class now . . . ’ and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.”

That doesn't seem super comforting to me, but Sartre apparently missed his little friends:

No longer taking mescaline, Sartre, who died in 1980, found himself pining for the distracting visions from his youth. “The crabs were mine. I had got used to them,” he said. “I would have liked my crabs to come back.”

Yet by then the crustaceans that he had once found so inspirational were nowhere to be seen. “We call them crabs because of my play [The Condemned of Altona, in which a race of crabs sits in judgment on humanity],” he said, “but they were really lobsters. And you know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them ... I remember how they used to sit there on my leg.”