{"id":10083,"date":"2025-02-18T14:44:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T18:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/19-year-old-simone-de-beauvoirs-resolutions-for-a-life-worth-living-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-18T14:44:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T18:44:03","slug":"19-year-old-simone-de-beauvoirs-resolutions-for-a-life-worth-living-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/19-year-old-simone-de-beauvoirs-resolutions-for-a-life-worth-living-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"19-year-old<\/a><\/p>\n

We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise \u2014 how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can\u2019t control \u2014 the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of \u2014 how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are.<\/p>\n

A lifetime before she looked back to contemplate how chance and choice converge to make us who we are<\/a>, the teenage Simone de Beauvoir<\/a> (January 9, 1908\u2013April 14, 1986) began considering the choices before her in creating herself out of the raw material of her givens \u2014 the limiting horizons of her time and place, the vast vista of her mind. (\u201cShe thinks like a man,\u201d her father boasted in a haunting testament to both.) <\/p>\n

\"\"
Simone de Beauvoir<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At seventeen, she had passed her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then gone on to study math at the Catholic University in Paris before crossing over to the Sorbonne for a degree in philosophy. She would become only the eighth woman to ever pass the agr\u00e9gation<\/em> \u2014 the most rigorous exam in the French education system \u2014 narrowly losing first place in her class to Sartre. <\/p>\n

It was at the Sorbonne where, still in her teens, she began bending her tensile and penetrating mind toward the kind of life she wanted to live and the kind of person she wanted to be. In her journal of that time, later published as the altogether magnificent Diary of a Philosophy Student<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), she approaches these questions with the oscillation between determination and self-doubt inherent to any great endeavor \u2014 for there is no greater creative act than the making of a life.
Punctuating the diary are touching reminders that even exceptional people are not spared the ordinary perturbations of being human \u2014 she is in some ways a typical teenager (\u201cMy winter was occupied almost uniquely with love and suffering.\u201d<\/em>) and a typical person (\u201cUnendingly I make resolutions that I never keep.\u201d<\/em>), and yet what she makes out of all that suffering, all that restlessness, all that yearning is what makes her \u2014 what makes anyone \u2014 extraordinary. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finding herself \u201cneither able to accept nor to refuse life,\u201d she peers into her near and faraway future:<\/p>\n

\n

I will be twenty years old in a few months. My education will be almost finished. I will have learned, read, seen everything essential and well beyond. I will have lived with my intelligence and my heart and known a rather wide world. I will even have begun to think by myself; there will be no wasted time. But then it will be advisable to put myself to work. If I live, I must fully accept the game; I must have the most beautiful life. I don\u2019t know why I am here, but since I remain here, I will construct a beautiful edifice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Then she reaches for the building blocks. Deeming her suffering \u201cuseless,\u201d she resolves to rise above it and aim her life toward \u201ca written work that would say everything, that would analyze souls in minute detail while breathing life into each body.\u201d Aware that this dream would demand of her absolute devotion and absolute discipline, she sets down a series of instructions to herself: <\/p>\n

\n

Take risks\u2026 Force myself to think for two pages per day\u2026 Don\u2019t scatter myself\u2026 Don\u2019t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing, and confide in someone who will criticize me and take me seriously.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I must\u2026 clarify my desire and proceed by trial and error in order to prepare what would eventually be a great written work\u2026 Analyze, understand, and descend more deeply into myself\u2026 It is imperative to begin. The questions that interest me must be studied in great depth\u2026 It would be necessary\u2026 to bring it together with the problems of the personality that love formulates so exactly \u2014 the problem of the act of faith that so closely touches the first two problems\u2026 It would be necessary to have the courage to write, not to expound ideas but to discover them, not to clothe them artistically but to animate them. The courage to believe in them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Because there can never be great achievement without great despair, because demanding everything and more of yourself is always wormed with doubt that you might not have it to give, the pendulum keeps swinging between determination and despair. Just after deciding to devote her summer vacation to exploring \u201cthe subject of love\u201d as a philosophical problem in \u201cat least thirty condensed and coherent pages,\u201d she plummets again:<\/p>\n

\n

What emptiness, what boredom! I hang on to some likable faces, but the too well loved face unendingly smiles at me with sorrow. For what indefinite crossing have I embarked at this precise point in time and space as though in the middle of an immense sea? A crossing whose goal is unknown.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card fromAn Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First she uses the lever of her formidable intellect to lift the heavy emotion:<\/p>\n

\n

I do not have the right to despair. [If] despair was justified\u2026 it demands to be demonstrated \u2014 to say, \u201cnothing is worth it,\u201d and to sit idly by with your arms crossed, to have the certainty that no certainty is possible; this is still dogmatism\u2026 I too am setting forth a postulate: it is first necessary to seek what is, then, I will see if I must still despair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But one can never reason one\u2019s way out of a powerful feeling-state \u2014 it simply has to be felt, suffered, endured \u201cfor what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it.\u201d<\/a> All despair of life is at bottom despair of oneself \u2014 something Beauvoir channels with the heightened intensity of adolescent feeling and the lashing censure of ambition:<\/p>\n

\n

I have examined my conscience, and here is what I have found: prideful, selfish, and not very good\u2026 I often have disgust for myself\u2026 I have closed myself in my ivory tower, saying, \u201cWho is worthy of entering here?\u201d I would sometimes open the door and that is all, but there are some people profoundly better than me, and this haughty attitude is stupid. Egoist \u2014 I love others only inasmuch as they are me; I easily scorn, and scornful, I no longer try to do my best\u2026 How severely I judge and with what right?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a momentary flash of self-compassion immediately clouded by the same sharp self-excoriation, she adds:<\/p>\n

\n

I should suffer with gentleness. I am hard, hard and proud. Become conscious of your own poverty, my girl, and of all of your cowardice!\u2026 I have covered my own cowardice with sophisms \u2014 oh!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She considers the steps to the courage of creating \u2014 a great work, or a great life:<\/p>\n

\n

Systematize my thoughts and believe in the value of thought. Read\u2026 Delve more deeply. Take all of this seriously. Be more pitiless towards myself and less skeptical with regards to others\u2026 Stop only in front of the evidence. Write conclusions once they are acquired\u2026 And above all: think for myself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet she locates the key to a fulfilling life not in the mind alone but in the largeness, the fulness, the unabashed openness of the heart:<\/p>\n

\n

Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Half a century later \u2014 having proven these postulates with her life, having written not just one great work but several \u2014 she would approach the art of growing old<\/a> with the same depth of thought and feeling. <\/p>\n

Complement with her contemporary Albert Camus on the three antidotes to the absurdity of life<\/a> and Walt Whitman\u2019s timeless recipe for a vibrant and rewarding life<\/a>, then revisit this omnibus of resolutions for a life worth living<\/a> borrowed from some extraordinary lives. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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