000			02011nam a2200193Ia 4500
999			_c20728 _d20728
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020			_a9.78023E+12
082			_a194 BEA
100			_a"Beauvoir, Simone De"
245		0	_aAdieux
260			_aLondon
260			_bAndre Deutsch
260			_c1984
300			_a453 p.
520			_aSimone de Beauvoir starts this book by simultaneously speaking to Jean-Paul Sartre and accepting that he is not there to hear. Their loving friendship, so long and so richly productive, ended in I980 with his death. Her farewell consists of a scrupulously exact account of the last years of his life as she saw them: his loss of sight, his increasing infirmity, the ways in which his vitality fought back, his quickly overcome depressions, her own wavering between dread and hope, his death. There are those who deplore her frank account of his physical deterioration as cruel, but the 'cruelty' is in the facts, not in her record. Like Sartre, de Beauvoir has always believed that the human intellect should pursue, analyse and accept the truth, and her courage and loyalty have not failed her now that experience has led her into a dark place. As a result, she can conclude on a note of stoic acceptance which has nothing to do with self-deception: 'His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are: it was in itself splendid enough that we could live our lives in harmony for so long.' The second part of the book is part of that harmony: long talks which they taped in 1974 as a way of getting round his blindness, which allowed him to express himself fully on writing, politics, his childhood, women, religion and many other matters. They 'allow one to follow the winding course of his thoughts and to hear his living voice'. The two documents together are too valuable as biography to be called merely 'a memorial'.
650			_aPhilosophers France biography
942			_cB _2ddc