Finished...in more ways than one

Woke up early and finished off Force of Circumstance - more because I wanted to put it out of its misery than through any desire for completion. The ending is so bleak and downbeat that I really must read something light and fluffy to counteract the sour and gloomy atmosphere that is lingering around me this morning (Alexander McCall Smith is good for that...The Unbearable Lightness of Scones maybe?). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that she had some sort of mid-life crisis (hackneyed concept though it is) that caused her to lose her enthusiasm for life, her insatiable desire for travel and experience, even for her writing, which latterly became a chore done with grim determination. She sensed the life draining out of her, hated the withering of her body, dreaded the separations inevitably wrought by death.
Well, we all do, love! But her reaction was to 'batten down the hatches', withdraw from society (save for a few intimates) and things that previously gave pleasure, and settle into a grimly monastic existence guaranteed to make her old age seem even longer and less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. She lived a very selfish life, did exactly what she pleased when she pleased, and in the end this self-sufficiency allowed her to pull her lonely cloak around herself with very little opposition. At the end of this book she laments that all her experiences, reading and knowledge 'made no honey....provide no-one with any nourishment' and bitterly regrets that her annihilation will terminate her repository of memories:


'If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to....what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place, I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.' (Force of Circumstance 'Epilogue')


Perhaps this is one of the best arguments against voluntary childlessness that I have ever read (although she never once even mentioned that she might have considered children, having had a horror of restriction and duty. Imagine a little Sartre/de Beauvoir!). The legacy of such emotional independence can turn out to be a terrible loneliness at an age when we are least capable of sustaining it.
I've still got All Said and Done (the fourth volume of her autobiography) to re-read. As I remember, this consists of a series of essays on important themes in her life - far more measured and reflective than Force of Circumstance's anguished threnody. I think, however, that I have had enough of Mme de Beauvoir for the time being. Maybe in the autumn I will turn to her again.