Life without Her would be Death

“Without her, life would be so boring and unbearable.” I am not always glued to Beauvoir everyday day but there is a satisfaction that my heart gets each time I remember of some novel way she describes something and I think to myself, “AAAH I have read that.” It must be a tragic life not to have read and enjoyed a single book by Simone De Beauvoir. Like many things of course I like to exaggerate my joy and yet I think I have hardly been able to describe fully how important her writing is to me.

You can imagine how I shrieked joyfully when in Tartu, Estonia I found myself in the scant English section of books staring directly at “The Inseparables” with Beauvoir’s name written on its spine. My heart felt a little tug that is so familiar among all who covet and buy books. It does not matter whether or not you read them. I am sure you will understand.

I got the book and started reading on my way back to Riga.

And she delivers. There is always something I have never understood about the authors that I enjoy reading. They are women. They sound like they are recounting their lives and yet some parts of them are fictional, and they have a way with words. Away they take you yet you feel so close to them. Like mothers, they scold, rebuke, become confused, cry, and even experience joy, they go through trials and tribulations with a certain confidence even when they seem to be all too human at the same time. They accept the tragedy yet they seem to be resolute In getting everything that they have ever wanted and they do. It is not a delusion or a fake sense of confidence that gets them moving forward, crawling, running, or even shuffling their feet. But they move nonetheless. And you look and you feel it so real, so humane, so tragic it hurts but you know they will prevail. Somehow you become confident and you stick with them and their stories.

Maybe there is a way to continue this discourse that I feel is starting to be lifted away from my mind. I feel the story I want to tell to fly away and I am watching it helplessly yet it's so clear like a big red balloon in a blue sky. The Inseparables is a kind of tragic tale like my tragic relationship with the women authors that I enjoy reading. Like Romeo and Juliet, Sisyphus and his curse or the fate of all men, living. It's a story about a clay kettle that just has to keep heating water until it can no longer hold the water, cracked, it is discarded in a pile of the other kettles that came before and for a little while has a distant memory of its usefulness and a hope for redemption that starts to fade slowly once its no longer useful and has stayed in the discard pile long enough to accept its fate.

You cannot justify happiness, nor can you justify God, his mercy, and his wrath especially the wrath he particularly seems to have for those who imagine him the most. How can someone who represents the most important deity of modern times and all of human civilization, someone who represents the end and the beginning of life in the belief systems of others cause so much pain in others? Is it possible that the gods that we create do more damage than the gods we never imagined existed?