advice/living

At this time, a friend wrote me a letter. He addressed me with the word “Dearest.” But however often I looked at the word “Dearest” and my name, I could not keep the two words together, because they did not seem related. He closed the letter by telling me to “have courage,” and I found, to my surprise, that if I simply looked at the words “have courage” there on the page, I had courage that I had not had a moment before.

Now in my forties, I have changed in ways that reach far beyond the limits of my concussion recovery. I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me. I know to listen to my body, but not so much that I convince myself I can’t do things or that I can’t push myself; not so much that I can use the concept of listening to my body as a weapon against my vitality. I do the highway drive I’m nervous about doing. I prepare to make a film. I write the book I’ve always wanted to write. “Run towards the danger” is a way of being that I have taken into my life with me; a treasure, a spell, a sword.

[...] “I was a madly gay little girl,” she writes, though what I noticed most in her description of her childhood wasn’t her happiness but her confidence. She had appalling handwriting (Sartre used to complain about it) and always “made a mess of hems,” but “as soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed of infinite power . . . when I was asleep, the earth disappeared; it had need of me in order to be seen, discovered and understood.” Her confidence, which never left her (“I have almost always felt happy and well adjusted,” she said at sixty-four, “and I have trusted in my star”), is astonishing. I have never known a woman, in person or in print, who talks about herself the way Simone de Beauvoir does. That preternatural conviction makes sense of the teenage Simone rejecting God and the social code of the bourgeoisie she was born into; the woman in her twenties believing that she was her lover’s essential love despite evidence to the contrary; the thirty-something deciding to write a book about the female condition; the fifty-year-old producing a 2,000-page autobiography. One day, while drying the dishes her mother was washing, she caught sight of the wives in the windows opposite doing the same thing, and had a vision of domestic life as a horrifying mise en abyme. “There had been people who had done things,” she said to herself. “I, too, would do things.” [...]