The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.
- Simone de Beauvoir
Argentinia's biker Luciano Benavides competes during Stage 12 of the Dakar Rally 2023 between Empty Quarter Marathon and Shaybah, in Saudi Arabia, 13 January 2023.
«Pero, en verdad, ¿por qué esos remordimientos, esos terrores? Yo no era por cierto una militante del feminismo; no tenía ninguna teoría respecto a los derechos y a los deberes de la mujer; así como antes me negaba a ser definida como “una chica”, ahora no me veía como “una mujer”: era yo. Sobre ese plano me sentía en falta. La idea de la salvación había sobrevivido en mí a la desaparición de Dios, y la primera de mis convicciones era que cada cual debía ocuparse personalmente de la suya. La contradicción que sufrí no era de orden social, sino moral y casi religioso. Aceptar vivir como un ser secundario, un ser “relativo”, habría sido rebajarme como criatura humana; todo mi pasado se sublevaba contra esa degradación.»
Simone de Beauvoir: La plenitud de la vida. Ed. Sudamericana, pág. 69. Buenos Aires, 1962
Studs Terkel interviews writer and artist Simone de Beauvoir at her home in Paris, France, where they discuss her family history, early writing career and artistic influences, individualism, and the creative commitment required to be a successful writer.
As part of our ongoing dialog over leftist praxis and AI, Nicolas Villareal recently put forward an article regarding the position of prophesy in theology and the question of the future. In it Villareal points toward prophesy as a universal of religion on a par with Herbert’s statement regarding the religious concern for the condition of the soul. Villareal argues prophesy is necessary for the…
Beauvoir’s visits: POL, 180, 184 (Feb.); POL, 191–6 (June). Cred, the director, Cred-cred in the Cred-Cred, New York, and New England Quarterly Review.
Kendall, E. et al.
The lover describes her tears and her tortures, but she asserts that she loves this unhappiness. It is also a source of delight for her. She likes the other to appear as another through her separation. It pleases her to exalt, by her very suffering, that strange existence which she chooses to set up as worthy of any sacrifice. It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 72
The tyrant does not care about love; he is content with fear. If he seeks the love of his subjects it is for political reasons and, if he can find a more economic way of subjugating them, he will adopt it at once. Contrary to this, the person who wants to be loved does not desire to subjugate the being he loves. He does not want to become the object of a boundless, mechanical passion. He does not want to possess an automatism, and if you want to humiliate him, you need only portray for him his loved one’s passion as the outcome of psychological determinism: the lover will feel devalued in his love and his being. His goal has been overshot: if the loved one is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself on his own. Thus the lover does not desire to possess his loved one in the way we can possess a thing: he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.
[And then we had to add this bar in here right now for more seating. Beauvoir. The addition of the new bar just adds that special touch. I like it better since the bar is open.]