It is in relationships that we find both our depth and our limits, where we free ourselves and transcend ourselves, where we are deeply hurt and where we experience great healing.
But despite how dangerous our emotional and spiritual relationships are – or perhaps because of them – they can be fragmented and sloppy, numb in their volatility and ambiguity, leaving us clinging to the comforting rigidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to control the chaos of the universe, neatly grouped themselves into filial love (the kind we feel for siblings, children, parents, and friends), eros (couple's love), and agape (deep, pure, impersonal and spiritual love). After the Enlightenment dismissed all love as a dysfunction of reason, the Romantics reclaimed it and revised the ancient taxonomy into princely, under the still-living tyranny, placing eros at the pinnacle of human existence. And yet our deepest relationships – the ones where we both become fully ourselves and have the greatest courage to change – often escape normal stages and change over the course of a lifetime.
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen years old when she applied her extraordinary intelligence to these questions in the pages of her journal, later published as. Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library). In the midst of formulating her decisions about the life to be lived, Beauvoir began to think seriously about the nature of love, its dialogue with nature, what she might want from it and what it might want from her – “in short, how souls can interact.” In the midst of intellectual infatuation with a young man who would go on to become a prominent philosopher in his own right – not one who would end up marrying a convention-breaking intellectual – he explores the essence of the feeling:
What does it mean that I love him? Does the word itself have a meaning?
Asking about the controversy of idolatry and the desire we masquerade as love, he increasingly suspects the very idea of personal love as foolishness against the background of the greatest love we can bear:
If you love creatures… not for their intelligence, etc., but for what they have deep inside, for their soul… you love them equally: they are perfect things, perfect as they are (to be = perfection). Why then is there this desire to approach? Knowing them, as well as loving them completely for who they really are. The surprising thing is not that we like them all, but rather that we prefer one of them.
Invoking the love he feels for his friends, their essence, he writes:
Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them… This is not the love of intelligence. This is the love of souls, coming from me in all its essence.
Again and again you return to the original question:
So what is love? Not much, not much… The sensitivity, the thought, the fatigue, and this effort to depend on the other; the taste of the other's mystery and the need to admire… What is important, friendship… this deep trust between [two people]and the joy of knowing that another exists.
Using Hegel's philosophy of freedom, when any person who knows freedom means liberating another, he arrives at the “preparation” of ideal friendship: “complete reconciliation and ownership of consciousness.” On the other hand, the ideal culture of romantic love, replaces this “perfect match” with arrogance and subordination of one person to another. You write:
It seems to me that love should not make everything else disappear but should simply add new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me for the rest of my life, not for the rest of my life.
This is, of course, Rilke's model of the perfect relationship – where “the highest duty is the bond between two people [is] that each must guard the solitude of the other” — echoing Octavio Paz's lovely description of love as “a knot made of two liberties united.”
Beauvoir ended up finding it not in romantic love but in the deepest friendship of her life – that with Zaza, her childhood best friend.
A year older than her and fond of books, Zaza was the only one young Simone could have “real conversations” with. In Memoirs of a Faithful Daughter (public library) – the first volume of his biography, mainly a memoir of love in this beautiful relationship – he would write about talking to Zaza:
My tongue was suddenly loosed, and a thousand bright suns began to burn in my breast; beaming with joy.
When Zaza's dress caught fire and burned his leg to the bone, he bravely endured a long life, then continued to climb trees and do cartwheels, play the piano and the violin. Beauvoir conveys a strong moment in the context of twentieth-century French bourgeois society, which is indicative of Zaza's spirit of defiance and undermining of convention:
One year at the music institute [Zaza] he did something while playing the piano that was almost embarrassing. The hall was packed. In the front rows were students in their best frocks, curls, rattles and beribbons, waiting for their turn to show off their skills. Behind them sat teachers and instructors wearing tight black silk blouses, wearing white gloves. At the back of the hall sat the parents and their guests. Zaza, resplendent in blue taffeta, played a part which her mother thought too difficult for her; every time he had to dodge a few bars: but this time he played it well, too, casting a triumphant eye. [her mother]let him out language to him! All the little girls' rings trembled in fear and the faces of the teachers stopped and masks of disapproval could be seen. But when Zaza came down from the platform, her mother kissed her so hard that no one dared to scold her. For me this exploit surrounded him with the glory of glory. Although I was subject to rules, to common behavior, to discrimination, yet I loved anything novel, sincere, and spontaneous. I was completely won over by Zaza's vitality and independence of spirit.
This strength of spirit, this understatement, is what young Simone loved so much about her friend – it strengthened her courage to defy convention in her life.
Part of the unexamined convention that Beauvoir internalized growing up was the belief that “in the human heart well-regulated friendship has an honorable position, but it has not the mysterious splendor of love, or the sacred dignity of parental devotion.” And yet through his relationship with Zaza, he came to question this limiting “dominance of emotions” and saw friendship as a deep form of communication. “I loved Zaza with a force that could not be counted by established rules and regulations,” he would remember decades later.
It was only in Zaza's absence – the absence caused by their families and school systems and the general separation of continuity that characterizes life – that Beauvoir found the value, the comfort, the salvation of her friend's presence:
So much so that I did not know anything about the workings of the heart that I did not think to say to myself: 'I miss him.' I needed his presence to realize how much I needed him. This was a blinding revelation. At the same time, conventions, routines, and careful categorization of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by an overwhelming feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be carried away by that wave of pleasure that kept growing inside me, violent and fresh like a waterfall membrane, naked, beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.
In his diary, he recounts one such reunion during his freshman year as a philosophy student:
I found Zaza again! Throughout the past year and this holiday, I believed that he was far, far away from me. And there he was very close and now we will be true friends. Oh! What a beautiful meaning this word has! We never spoke like that, and I didn't even hope it would happen – but why, again, you don't believe in happiness… Let's combine our two moments of solitude together!… When I left him, I experienced one of the best hours of my life, my love and my friendship both greater than their marriage.
Beauvoir found deep friendship to be safer and stronger than love, which did not have “the great hatred of love, irreconcilable pride, sensual sadness, mutual abuse,” which did not “bring jealousy, demands, and doubts.” To have what the ancient Celts called history — “friend of the soul” — he asks us for everything, he invites all the parts we live with and urges us to appear whole, but he wants nothing.
Looking back on her life, Beauvoir reflects:
I didn't need Zaza to have such feelings about me: it was enough to be his best friend. The admiration I felt for him did not diminish in my eyes. Love does not envy. I couldn't think of anything better in the world than being me, and I love Zaza.
In the middle of Beauvoir's sophomore year, Zaza died suddenly and inexplicably – an illness as swift and merciless as an owl. He was 21 years old. In the midst of terrible grief, Beauvoir turned even more to the understanding of philosophy, seeking its eternal solace. During the sweep of years and decades, Zaza's constant presence never left his life. (“No one you love ever dies,” Ernest Hemingway wrote at the time in a letter of condolence to an inconsolable friend.) Loving Zaza had awakened Beauvoir's friendship, set her on the path to who she would become—one of humanity's most daring intellectuals, her visions reaching deep into her generation, shaping moments of extraordinary friendship that touch the real life to come. It's my touch. Maybe touch yours.
Complete with Seneca on true friendship vs The Little Prince writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the loss of a friend, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice combine to make us who we are and the art of growing up.
