That old hankering
I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life – the translation of La Force de l’Age, the second volume of her memoirs – last night and arrived at a sentence that I found supremely hilarious.
It’s November, and she and Sartre are sitting on the terrace of a café in Le Havre, as one does, “complaining at length about the monotony of our future existence.” That’s not it though. This is it:
If I drank a little too much one evening I was liable to burst into floods of tears, and my old hankering after the Absolute would be aroused again.
You’re welcome.
I’d appreciate an interpretation, what is the ‘Absolute’? Is it similar to ‘spiritual’, whatever that means?
I was reading it as the Absolut, as in she really wanted her favorite vodka.
…or perhaps too much ‘green fairy’.
Lordy, I don’t know – that’s part of why it made me fall about laughing.
I haven’t read the first volume or the beginning of that volume; no doubt she explains what she means by it. One can guess, knowing the existentialists & what they were reacting to.
There’s a bit in Howard’s End when Margaret and Helen are writing letters while Helen is in Germany, and Margaret tells Helen something like “Don’t dwell too much on the unseen, because” blah blah blah and Helen writes back something like “What do you take me for? I don’t dwell on the unseen. Get a grip.”
The Absolute is, you know, the opposite of all this annoying contingency and temporariness and flimsiness of everything we can see and know.
Thank you Project Gutenberg. Here’s the actual passage:
Ophelia,
“The Absolute is, you know, the opposite of all this annoying contingency and the temporariness and flimsiness of everything we can see and know”.
Er…. OK.
I’ll still take Helen’s advice and file ‘The Absolute’ under ‘Pretentious Gallic Drivel’.
Well I trust I didn’t give the impression that I’m taking it seriously.
Ophelia,
Never, ‘you’re welcome’ removed any ambiguities.
It was a diversion from the gathering Trump-cloud above Mt Doom.
I believe this quote (found on Wikipedia) explains it…
“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”