Simone de beauvoir biography resumo

I see reviewers here complaining that La vieillesse is boring, or disorganised, or outdated gerontology or whatever, but with all due respect I think this is missing the point. Simone de Beauvoir, now in her early sixties, is a distinguished author and philosopher characterised by her calm, lucid way of approaching all kinds of difficult questions. It has been clear to her for some time that she is getting older, and will soon, perhaps even now, be at an age when she's generally called "old". Well: what does that mean? What is old age? Is it an objective thing, a social construct, or a combination of the two? How do people experience being old? What strategies do you have for dealing with the fact of being old? How do different cultures treat old people? What ethical issues arise? In short, she's setting out to examine old age from a philosophical point of view.

De Beauvoir starts off by saying that most people have a great deal of resistance to thinking about these things at all and would rather avoid them: denial is definitely the preferred approach. I will never get old, they tell themselves. I am going to stay young, maybe not in body but at least in spirit. Perhaps I will kill myself to avoid such a miserable fate. (She tells us this is a very common reaction). And yet, most people become old. So why not look at what this means? At first, I did indeed find La vieillesse hard to get through, and progress became mysteriously stalled for a couple of months as I switched to more appealing books; but I decided to return to it, and after a while I found I was hooked. She's right. There's no point in pretending the problems don't exist, and once you start thinking about them they are fascinating.

There are many different threads. Every other page contains something you want to quote - my favourite was Paulhan's comment that old age had revealed to him the existence of several things he'd previously thought were only to be foun