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24/06/13 10:30Turning Abruptly from Friendship to Love: Sartre's Love Letter to Simone de Beauvoir | Brain Pickings
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Turning Abruptly from Friendship toLove: Sartre’s Love Letter toSimone de Beauvoirby Maria Popova
“I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards asa constituent element of myself.”
As a lover of spectacular love letters, especially
ones between history’s creative and intellectual
power couples — like those between Frida Kahlo
and Diego Rivera, Virginia Woolf and Vita
Sackville-West, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred
Stieglitz, Charles and Ray Eames, and Henry
Miller and Anaïs Nin — I was delighted to come
upon a gem from legendary French existentialist
philosopher, novelist, and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905–April 15, 1980) to
celebrated French writer, intellectual, and
feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir (January
9, 1908–April 14, 1986).
In this beautiful missive from the spring of 1929, found in the altogether
wonderful collection Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre toSimone De Beauvoir, 1926-1939 (public library), 24-year-old Jean-Paul writes to
21-year-old Simone Jollivet — herself the eventual masterful writer of breakup
letters — at the dawn of their romance, shortly before he proposed marriage,
which Simone turned down; instead, the two embarked on their famous lifelong
open relationship.
24/06/13 10:30Turning Abruptly from Friendship to Love: Sartre's Love Letter to Simone de Beauvoir | Brain Pickings
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My dear little girl
For a long time I’ve been wanting to write to you in theevening after one of those outings with friends that I will soonbe describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. Iwanted to bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at yourfeet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tiredout by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’mdoing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turningabruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness.Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: Iam neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in thedesire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you andturning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. Thishappens much more often than I admit to you, but seldomwhen I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love youwhile paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simplyloved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love youwith the window open. You are mine, and things are mine,and my love alters the things around me and the thingsaround me alter my love.
My dear little girl, as I’ve told you, what you’re lacking isfriendship. But now is the time for more practical advice.Couldn’t you find a woman friend? How can Toulouse fail tocontain one intelligent young woman worthy of you*? Butyou wouldn’t have to love her. Alas, you’re always ready togive your love, it’s the easiest thing to get from you. I’m nottalking about your love for me, which is well beyond that, butyou are lavish with little secondary loves, like that night inThiviers when you loved that peasant walking downhill in thedark, whistling away, who turned out to be me. Get to knowthe feeling, free of tenderness, that comes from being two. It’s
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must-reads
hard, because all friendship, even between two red-bloodedmen, has its moments of love. I have only to console mygrieving friend to love him; it’s a feeling easily weakened anddistorted. But you’re capable of it, and you must experience it.And so, despite your fleeting misanthropy, have you imaginedwhat a lovely adventure it would be to search Toulouse for awoman who would be worthy of you and whom you wouldn’tbe in love with? Don’t bother with the physical side or thesocial situation. And search honestly. And if you find nothing,turn Henri Pons, whom you scarcely love anymore, into afriend.
[…]
I love you with all my heart and soul.
* De Beauvoir would come to have a number of young female lovers, whom she’d usually introduce to Sartre
over the course of their relationship.
Complement with Sartre on why “being-in-the-world-ness” is the key to the
imagination and De Beauvoir on ambiguity, vitality, and freedom.
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24/06/13 10:30Turning Abruptly from Friendship to Love: Sartre's Love Letter to Simone de Beauvoir | Brain Pickings
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