B: Many of your friendships have ended in estrangement … why are things like that?
S: Breaking off doesn’t affect me in the least. A thing is dead – that’s all.
B: Can you tell me why it doesn’t affect you?
S: I think I did not feel a deep friendship for some of the men who were among the closer of my friends.
B: But what do you mean when you say, “I didn’t feel a deep friendship”? Who have you had a deep friendship with?
S: With some women … but generally speaking, there weren’t deep sensitive elements between the other fellows and myself.
B: Do you mean that what existed was rather a certain intellectual understanding, and that this understanding came to an end either for political reasons or for others, then everything fell to pieces?
S: Yes, that’s right.
B: The emotional bond that makes one overlook certain divergences did not remain …
S: Exactly….
B: And on the whole you always prefer the present.
S: The present is concrete and real. Yesterday is not so sharp and clear, and I’m not yet thinking of tomorrow. For me there is a preference for the present over the past. There are people who like the past better because they attribute an aesthetic or cultural value to it. I don’t. In moving into the past the present dies. It loses its value of dawning life. It still belongs to life. I can refer back to it; but it no longer possesses that quality that is given to every moment insofar as I am living it and which it loses when I am living it no more.
B: No doubt that’s why you have never found it very hard to break with your friends
S: Yes. I began a new life without them.
B: Is that because as soon as a thing belongs to the past it is really abolished for you?
S: Yes. And as for the friends who are still left to me, still living, they have to have a fresh present immediacy so as not to be continually harking back to the same one. I mustn’t see them as they were yesterday or the day before, with the same worries, the same ideas, the same ways of speaking. There has to be a change.
S: Breaking off doesn’t affect me in the least. A thing is dead – that’s all.
B: Can you tell me why it doesn’t affect you?
S: I think I did not feel a deep friendship for some of the men who were among the closer of my friends.
B: But what do you mean when you say, “I didn’t feel a deep friendship”? Who have you had a deep friendship with?
S: With some women … but generally speaking, there weren’t deep sensitive elements between the other fellows and myself.
B: Do you mean that what existed was rather a certain intellectual understanding, and that this understanding came to an end either for political reasons or for others, then everything fell to pieces?
S: Yes, that’s right.
B: The emotional bond that makes one overlook certain divergences did not remain …
S: Exactly….
B: And on the whole you always prefer the present.
S: The present is concrete and real. Yesterday is not so sharp and clear, and I’m not yet thinking of tomorrow. For me there is a preference for the present over the past. There are people who like the past better because they attribute an aesthetic or cultural value to it. I don’t. In moving into the past the present dies. It loses its value of dawning life. It still belongs to life. I can refer back to it; but it no longer possesses that quality that is given to every moment insofar as I am living it and which it loses when I am living it no more.
B: No doubt that’s why you have never found it very hard to break with your friends
S: Yes. I began a new life without them.
B: Is that because as soon as a thing belongs to the past it is really abolished for you?
S: Yes. And as for the friends who are still left to me, still living, they have to have a fresh present immediacy so as not to be continually harking back to the same one. I mustn’t see them as they were yesterday or the day before, with the same worries, the same ideas, the same ways of speaking. There has to be a change.
... Jean-Paul Sartre (S) (1905-80) in conversation with Simone de Beauvoir (B) (1908-86) in late life.
Sartre’s philosophy was never very coherent and means nothing now; his novels are unreadable, in French and still more in English. One or two of his plays may survive. Indeed I would like to see Huis clos revived here so we can see whether it has lasted. He himself ended up rather a pathetic figure, blind, usually drunk, often incontinent, dirty and bewildered – and broke. He was a beneficiary and a victim of the old Paris publishers’ practice of giving favoured authors any money they asked for, then chalking it up on the slate. Sartre’s one real virtue was generosity (he was the only left-wing intellectual I have ever known who was ready with his money), and much of the large sums he earned at the time went into the unworthy hands of sycophants and camp-followers. He had terminal rows with all his male friends who matched him in intellect or talent – Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus and so on.
ReplyDeleteWhat a remarkable conversation. It brings to mind James Thurber's observation that "old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man". It would seem that Sartre in old age has wisely stepped directly into the realm of containment ... that is, a forthright rejection of slipping into the seductive maudlin habit of mulling over the past so common of old men who have nothing else to do but die, until they realize, if ever, what a futile waste of time it is.
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