Sartre’s fictional chestnut trees trace back to a childhood ghost story

Evidence

Sartre had incorporated many of his own experiences into his writing: the out-of-season seaside town, the hallucinations, the insight about contingency. Even the obsession with the chestnut tree was personal: his work is full of trees. In his autobiography, he recalled being terrified as a child by a ghost story in which a young woman, ill in bed, suddenly screams, points out of the window at the chestnut tree outside, then falls dead on her pillow. In Sartre’s own story ‘Childhood of a Leader’, the protagonist Lucien becomes horrified by a chestnut tree because it sits there unresponsively when he kicks it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 340

Categorization

• XREF: The tree as recurring personal symbol parallels the reader’s prior interest in trees as infrastructure and symbol in the earlier article.
• ADDENDUM: Supplements the trees-as-infrastructure article’s catalogue with a concrete case of a tree as psychological/symbolic infrastructure in a philosopher’s imaginative world.