The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

By Maria Popova

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing.

But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love (the kind we feel for siblings, children, parents, and friends), eros (the love of lovers), and agape (the deepest, purest, most impersonal and spiritual love). After the Enlightenment discounted all love as a malfunction of reason, the Romantics reclaimed it and revised the ancient taxonomy into a hierarchy, under the tyranny of which we still live, placing eros at the pinnacle of human existence. And yet our deepest relationships — the ones in which we both become most fully ourselves and are most emboldened to change — tend to elude the commonplace classifications and to shape-shift across the span of life.

Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen when she wielded her uncommon intellect at these questions on the pages of her journal, later published as Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library). In between composing her resolutions for a life worth living, Beauvoir began thinking seriously about the nature of love, its dialogue with her own nature, what she may want of it and what it may demand of her — “in brief, how souls can interact with one another.” In the midst of an intellectual infatuation with a young man who would go on to become an eminent philosopher himself — not the one she would eventually marry in a convention-breaking union of minds — she examines the substance of the feeling:

To say that I love him, what does that mean? Does the word itself have a meaning?

Questioning the tangle of idolization and desire that masquerades as love, she grows suspicious of the very concept of personal love as an absurdity against the backdrop of the largest love we can carry:

When you love beings… not for their intelligence, etc., but for what they have in their very depths, for their soul… you love them equally: they are entireties, perfect inasmuch as they are (to be = perfection). Why then is there this desire to get closer? To know them, and thus to love them more perfectly for what they really are. What is surprising is not that we love them all, but rather that we prefer one of them.

Invoking the love she feels for her friends, the sum total of them, she writes:

Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them… This is not intellectual love. This is a love for souls, from all of me towards all of them in their entirety.

Over and over she returns to the elemental question:

What then is love? Not much, not much… Sensitivity, imagination, fatigue, and this effort to depend on another; the taste for the mystery of the other and the need to admire… What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme — a poignant modern fable about how friendship anchors and transforms us.

Drawing on Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, in which for any conscious subject to be free means freeing the other, she arrives at a “formula” for the ideal friendship: “absolute reciprocity and the identity of consciousness.” The cultural ideal of romantic love, on the other hand, replaces this “absolute reciprocity” with engulfment and sublimation of one self into the other. She writes:

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.

This, of course, is Rilke’s model of a perfect relationship — one in which “the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other” — consonant with Octavio Paz’s lovely definition of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

Beauvoir ultimately found it not in romantic love but in the deepest friendship of her life — that with Zaza, her childhood best friend.

A year older than her and also enamored of books, Zaza was the only one with whom the young Simone could have “real conversations.” In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (public library) — the first volume of her autobiography, largely a loving memorial to this formative relationship — she would write of talking to Zaza:

My tongue was suddenly loosened, and a thousand bright suns began blazing in my breast; radiant with happiness.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

When Zaza’s dress caught fire and charred her leg to the bone, she endured the long convalescence valiantly, then went on to climb trees and do cartwheels, to play the piano and the violin. Beauvoir relays a moment radical in the context of early twentieth-century French bourgeoise society, emblematic of Zaza’s defiant spirit and playful disdain for convention:

One year at a music recital [Zaza] did something while she was playing the piano which was very nearly scandalous. The hall was packed. In the front rows were the pupils in their best frocks, curled and ringleted and beribboned, who were awaiting their turn to show off their talents. Behind them sat the teachers and tutors in stiff black silk bodices, wearing white gloves. At the back of the hall were seated the parents and their guests. Zaza, resplendent in blue taffeta, played a piece which her mother thought was too difficult for her; she always had to scramble through a few of the bars: but this time she played it perfectly, and, casting a triumphant glance at [her mother], put out her tongue at her! All the little girls’ ringlets trembled with apprehension and the teachers’ faces froze into disapproving masks. But when Zaza came down from the platform her mother gave her such a light-hearted kiss that no one dare reprimand her. For me this exploit surrounded her with a halo of glory. Although I was subject to laws, to conventional behaviour, to prejudice, I nevertheless liked anything novel, sincere, and spontaneous. I was completely won over by Zaza’s vivacity and independence of spirit.

This strength of spirit, this defiance of the givens, is what the young Simone most admired about her friend — it emboldened her to defy convention in her own life.

Part of the unexamined convention Beauvoir had internalized growing up was the belief that “in a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honourable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendour of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion.” And yet through her relationship with Zaza, she came to question this limiting “hierarchy of the emotions” and to see friendship as the deepest stratum of connection. “I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” she would reflect decades later.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

It was only in Zaza’s absence — absences inflicted by their families and school schedules and the general fractures of continuity that life presents — that Beauvoir came to grasp the importance, the consolation, the salvation of her friend’s presence:

So total had been my ignorance of the workings of the heart that I hadn’t thought of telling myself: ‘I miss her.’ I needed her presence to realize how much I needed her. This was a blinding revelation. All at once, conventions, routines, and the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.

In her diary, she recounts one such reunion during her freshman year as a philosophy student:

I found Zaza again! All last year and during this vacation, I believed that she was far, very far from me. And there she was infinitely close by and now we are going to be true friends. Oh! What a beautiful meaning this word has! Never have we spoken so, and I was not even hoping that it could happen — but why, too, never believe in happiness… Let us bring our two solitudes together!… When I had left her, I experienced one of the most beautiful hours of my life, my love and my friendship both greater from their union.

Beauvoir was discovering deep friendship as safer and more resilient than romance, free from “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures,” never “introducing jealousy, demands, and doubts.” To have what the ancient Celts called anam cara — “soul friend” — asks everything of us, invites all the parts we live with and urges us to show up whole, yet demands nothing.

Looking back on her life, Beauvoir reflects:

I didn’t require Zaza to have any such definite feelings about me: it was enough to be her best friend. The admiration I felt for her did not diminish me in my own eyes. Love is not envy. I could think of nothing better in the world than being myself, and loving Zaza.

Midway through Beauvoir’s sophomore year, Zaza died suddenly and mysteriously — an illness swift and merciless as an owl. She was 21. Amid the savage grief, Beauvoir turned even more sharply toward philosophy, seeking its eternal consolations. Across the sweep of the years and decades, Zaza’s inextinguishable presence never left her life. (“No one you love is ever dead,” Ernest Hemingway wrote around that time in a letter of consolation to an inconsolable friend.) Loving Zaza had ignited Beauvoir’s becoming, setting her on the course of who she would become — one of humanity’s most daring breakers of convention, her ideas reaching into the depths of her time, shaping the times to come, touching the lives of generations of strangers the way a true friendship does. Touching mine. Perhaps touching yours.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Complement with Seneca on true vs. false friendship and Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are and the art of growing older.

BP

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

By Maria Popova

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the frosted windows of the here and now.

It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.

If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

The Tiger by Franz Marc, 1912. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) explores in his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, found in his collection The Better Sort (public library | public domain) — the story of a man whose entire life, from his earliest memory, has been animated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” something fated “sooner or later to happen” and, in happening, to either destroy him or remake his life. He calls it “the thing,” imagines it as a “beast in the jungle” lying in wait for him, and spends his life lying in wait for it, withholding his participation in the very experiences that might have that transformative effect — leaping after some great dream, risking his life for some great cause, falling in love.

It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.

Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare 1946 edition of the essays of Montaigne

James writes:

Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

When the protagonist meets a woman to whom his entire being pulls him, he begins spending time with her but ultimately keeps her heart at arm’s length, too afraid to love her, telling himself that he is protecting her from his fatalistic fate, failing to recognize that love itself is that great force of self-annihilation and transformation, “rare and strange” even as the most commonplace human experience.

Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

When Time forecloses possibility, as Time always ultimately does, he arrives at his final reckoning at her tombstone:

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself… The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips… This was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

Complement with Anaïs Nin on how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living and Mary Oliver on the key to living with maximum aliveness, then revisit Henry James’s equally brilliant sister Alice on how to live fully while dying.

BP

Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life

By Maria Popova

The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.

In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.

In a lovely metaphor rooted in the evolutionary history of life, he contrasts the spirit of youth to that of our later years:

The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

Passionflower and passionfruit by Étienne Denisse from Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.

In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:

In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.

A century before science illuminated the poetics of wintering trees as a lens on renewal, Gibran writes:

In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.

Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:

Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.

Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older and how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, then revisit Gibran’s luminous wisdom on the courage to know yourself, the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and the secret to a lasting relationship.

BP

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author

By Maria Popova

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author

In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance to learn from one of the world’s greatest storytellers.

After a decade as a struggling obscure writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) — brilliant, strange, so frail and tubercular he was always on the brink of death — had just been catapulted into global fame by Treasure Island, published a year earlier. With her mother’s help, Adelaide procured an introduction to the author and his fierce wife Fanny. By the perfect balance of audacity, veneration, and kindness, she was eventually welcomed into the “enchanted palace” of the couple’s world — first as their affectionately nicknamed “game-keeper” (for looking after their menagerie of stray cats and pigeons), then as Stevenson’s scribe (the typewriter was still a clunky novelty), and eventually, to her disbelieving exhilaration, as his pupil.

Thirty-seven years later, with Stevenson long gone, she set down her memories of life at Skerryvore — the name the Stevensons had given their home, after a lighthouse built by the author’s uncle on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland — in the slender, utterly delightful 1926 gem R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, Flashlights from Skerryvore (public library | public domain). Punctuating her loving recollections is a series of invaluable writing lessons from one of the greatest storytellers our civilization has produced.

Robert Louis Stevenson by Henry Walter Barnett, 1883.

Clad in his velvet coat and dark red tie, wrapped in a Kashmir shawl, perched on the edge of a suitcase, Stevenson would give the young woman assignments, then listen to her read them out loud and, with amicable brutality, offer his suggestions for improvement. In an era when women comprised less than 1% of published authors, often writing under initials or pseudonyms to guard from bias, Stevenson — a fierce feminist by the standards of his era, and even by the standards of ours — believed that women were not any lesser at writing than men, but that their writing suffered because they were too proud to edit, to accept any “suggestion at amendment,” to concede that the first attempt is rarely the best one can do. (Let us not be too proud to admit that he might be somewhat right.) His greatest gift to his young pupil was the humility and discipline of editing. She recounts:

Though as a critic absolutely merciless, nobody in the world rewarded more lavishly or with keener pleasure what he called “a good, honest piece of work.”

Her initiation into the craft began with listening — she would sit in on Stevenson reading his drafts of what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Fanny — his lifelong collaborator, editor, and caretaker, who carried her perennially sickly husband (“just an animated bundle of shawls and wraps, with long, thin hair and burning eyes,” Adelaide remembers) up and down the stairs between his bedroom and the Blue Room where he wrote. Fanny would in turn offer her own merciless feedback as Adelaide absorbed every word.

Eventually, Stevenson began giving her direct instruction. Because all originality begins in imitation, and because creativity is crippled without craftsmanship, he first tasked her with reading some of her favorite authors and attempting short pieces of writing in each of their style. To then discover her own voice, he assigned her a short description of something she loved, giving her a tight word count and a day to finish. She chose her garden. Despite her vivid feeling for its “unique charm,” attempt after attempt at a written description “ended in a passion of despair.” She stayed up all night until, by sunrise, she had arrived at a version to her satisfaction, even edged with pride. But when she presented it to Stevenson, he tore it apart. After doing some math on the language, dividing the word count by the word parts, he indicted her prose for containing a staggering 17% adjectives — “and mostly weak ones at that!” — then exhorted her to always choose descriptive verbs over them:

If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about ‘climbing roses’ or ‘green, mossy lawns.’ Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about ‘green grass.’ Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others.

Art from The Forgotten Teachers

He then instructed her to read with a sensitive ear and listen for the one word that breaks “the rhythm of a sentence otherwise neatly balanced.” One well chosen word, he taught her, can “send the breath of life through a paralysed sentence,” can serve as a “landmark” amid “a featureless desert of words” to help the writer “get back home to the heart of things.”

Looking back on her experience, Adelaide synthesizes some of his most invaluable guardrails against bad writing:

  • Keep it tight to keep it strong: “Never let a long sentence get out of hand. If it begins to run loose, tie it in a knot with a good strong inversion: swing it round on a pivot.”
    • Don’t describe things by what they are not: “Never state a thing backwards.”
    • Become a tuning fork for meaning: “Read every sentence aloud to yourself. If the sense is not limpidly clear, make it so before you pass on. If needs be, write it over and over again, but nothing with which your own ear is dissatisfied must ever be allowed to stand.”
    • Use good language even when relaying bad speech: When recreating dialogue in writing, “never let the vulgar craze for realistic writing run away with you”: paraphrase “commonplace talk” in a way that remains “true to the spirit of a speaker” but elevates the style.

But perhaps the most potent advice on writing — that which emboldened Adelaide to actually become an author — came from Fanny Stevenson. When Adelaide first confided in her that she had been “only trying” at writing for years but often felt “hopeless,” Fanny took a long silence, then offered:

Whatever you have honestly tried to do well was worth doing. It always is.

Complement with other abiding wisdom on writing from Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Octavia Butler, and Mary Oliver, then revisit Stevenson on what makes life worth living.

BP

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