Chapter 12 will to live (2)

According to this more orthodox version, Simone and Sartre were the kind of great intellectuals we all know who opposed idolatry and intervened (often awkwardly: they were pro-Soviet in a rather humbling late period), As keen thinkers, they were able to synthesize and summarize the basic ideas of their time: Beauvoir's feminism, or Sartre and Beauvoir's existentialism, and use this to promote a new atheistic morality-human beings in the world. Absolute freedom and responsibility in building your own future.Their unusual relationship is all the more intriguing: the two of them, referred to as "you," never lived together, but lived in adjoining rooms in hotels or apartments on the same block, and both had various occasional encounters. The lover, that is, the lover who, though important and passionate, takes second place.From the outside, this unusual pair seemed wonderful and indestructible (it remained for fifty-one years), a model for other possible ways of living together.On their own, the relationship is simply talking about their totemic discourse as existentialists and lovers, honest and transparent.

But the second version after that was Simone and Sartre in private.As intimate documents were published after their deaths, the duo emerged like a dirty puff of foam.We thus learn that Sartre is a compulsive and pathetic Don Juan, who needs to completely conquer all women, and to do so, writes them profusion of clumsy, bawdy love letters, "My absolute love, my little passion, my forever Great love", the repetitive sentence was written in different letters on the same day for different secret lovers who existed at the same time. For honesty and transparency exist only between Simone and Sartre, used to shamelessly comment on the most profligate details of their affair.

It seems that both Simone and Sartre need a group of devoted admirers.Oddly, they have few friends of their own age (and very few lovers): they prefer to rule their so-called "family" like happy bodhisattvas, a group of young students and disciples who infuse them with love and adoration, and who serve People pay the rent or the doctor's bills, bear them in life, never let go of the umbilical cord, and thus keep these people weak and dependent on their glory.The bisexual Simone enters into several triangles with Sartre: such as Olga and Louise, the girls who share them, who were not yet eighteen when they fell in love with the also young Beauvoir (the girls' Age eventually became an issue: Nathalie's mother sued Simone in 1943 for molesting a minor, and Beauvoir was expelled from education).All in all, the emotional trap that Sartre and Simone fall into is as silly, complex, and ridiculous as a burlesque.

For example during the war, Simone simultaneously maintained a secret relationship with Bost, a student of Sartre, with Nathalie, Louise and Olga, all of whom were known only to Sartre; if it were not for Beauvoir and Sartre need not be blamed, or even wondered, for the unbearably superior, cruel, and frivolous tone of their letters (who has not at some point in his life experienced a time of insanity ?).Speaking of a lover to whom he promised a fiery love for eternity, Sartre said to Beauvoir, "Wanda has the head of a mosquito"; vacuum cleaner horsepower to suck my tongue".After making impulsive passionate vows to their shared poor Louise ("I want you to know that I love you passionately and forever"), accusing her utterly callously and planning the lies that will be told to her, "so that she is happy and not too annoying".One of Beauvoir's most despicable comments was made about this Louise: she complained that the girl's body odor made intercourse "painful" (although Simone didn't stop sleeping with her because of it).

A reading of the pair's letterheads and intimate diaries eventually paints a somewhat creepy portrait: at worst they are like comrades-in-arms in the barracks, sharing the sordid honor of winning; It is the cold and brutal entomologist who dissects all life as purely literary stuff. "I'm sure I'm a pig," Sartre used to say; Beauvoir was eager to convince him of the opposite: the sheer emptiness of self-devouring words. "When I see all those failures and all these kind and weak children like Louise or Olga, it makes me happy to think how strong we, you and I, are", reveling in self-satisfaction Simone to Sartre.That seemed to be what Beauvoir was looking for in others: a mirror of her own greatness.So she says of Nathalie: "She loves me at least as much as Louise loved me," a statement that undoubtedly reveals her way of relating to people.In the face of a new love, one becomes accustomed to emphasizing one's own emotions (I love her more than anyone else), rather than making a commercial comparison of the amount of love you receive.

That callous and entomological exploitation of the emotions of others has paid its price.During the two years that the love triangle lasted, Olga became so insane that she later extinguished her cigarette in her hand.When she was old, she read Sartre's private letters, published by Simone after Sartre's death; and when she saw how they referred to her in the letters, Olga was so disgusted that she broke with Simone, And died a few months later without reconciling with Simone.As for the American writer Nelson Algren, when he was seventy-two years old, he recalled in front of a reporter that Simone abused their relationship, and then died of a heart attack caused by rage - Simone in the novel "The Celebrity" and her memoirs Both have spoken about their relationship with Algren and made their relationship "brazenly" public, including passages from Algren's letter to Simone, where he could not forgive her.

Perhaps Sartre cannot really love anyone; Simone, on the contrary, can: she loves Sartre faithfully, or at least deeply in the love she imagines for him.I mean, within Beauvoir's strong effort to shape himself, there is also a place for a perfect love.She thus tolerates Sartre's eccentricities and slights; it is Simone who maintains this time-traveling history, even when she associates with others (such as the journalist Claude Lanzmann, seventeen years her junior), , he was the only man with whom she had ever lived together) while maintaining an intimate relationship. But life is often cruel, no matter how strong the human will is, they cannot fight against fate.Over time, Simone and Sartre gradually distanced themselves from each other.Both of them spent their later years with women who were thirty years younger than them: Arlette for Sartre, and Sylvie for Beauvoir.Both legally adopted them as their own daughters; each slowly built a world of unusual relationships.Sartre's last seven years were the most tragic: the philosopher was blind and probably brain-affected.He began to make some very poor opinions that Simone didn't understand or agree with.This is the final betrayal - they are no longer two bodies with only one head.Simone recounted Sartre's dying moments to her biographers Frances and Contier: lying on a hospital bed, he closed his eyes and said: "I love you very much, my beloved beaver", and offered her his lips, she kissed his lips; then he fell asleep and died.A touching scene, the literary orgasm of a perfect love life, which Frances and Contiers published in their wonderful book, thought it was true.But the truth is: Arlette was with Sartre when he died.Simone arrived later and tried to get into the hospital bed to lie with the body.

Simone's sad lie just proves how pathetic her next actions are.For Arlette was, and is, the rightful heir of Sartre and executor of all his works (which Sartre did with unbearable cruelty to Simone); Within the framework of her design, she created Farewell Rituals, her stunning work on Sartre's final years; when Arlette published the philosopher's posthumous manuscripts, she published the Letter: Every sentence is a link, connecting Sartre's image with hers.