At her funeral, of all the passages of all the books
she’d written, Lanzmann chose to read the last paragraph of Force of
Circumstance:
I loathe the thought of annihilating myself
quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve
read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be
no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and
suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one
with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will
think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the
experience that I lived, with all its order and all its randomness – the Opera
of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued,
Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five thousand
Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights
of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red
sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about,
others I have left unspoken – there is no place where it will all live again.
From the grave, Beauvoir clinches the argument. Life
isn’t supposed to be lived as some kind of example to others; all it is, all it
can be, is a crashing together of moments. Beauvoir couldn’t come again – and
thank God. But I have my heroine back, freed from her concrete block.
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