I’m starting to see worse.
I’ve had myopia since the second grade, but after the age of fifty, my farsightedness began to improve. He has to move his hand a greater distance to read a small text.
A belief in balancing nearsightedness and farsightedness resides only in the minds of healthy elves. Number. You don’t see it that way and you don’t see it that way (unfortunately).
Life shakes you, eats you piece by piece, gives you nothing in return. Here I put the seal “not to print”, here – “restriction for publication”, here – “only with banknotes”. You see, in general, you will be banned soon.
I don’t know if Simone de Beauvoir has vision problems, most likely no, I don’t see her wearing glasses in any of the pictures – but she had problems with the ban. (It’s just Sartre, his eternal man, a double, nearsighted man, again blind in one eye).
When I looked at what happened in April all these years, it turned out that on April 9, 1966, the Vatican Forbidden Books Index was cancelled. It has been operating for more than four centuries.
In vain I liked the idea of the printed book, I began to skim through names and titles – everything is predictable: Voltaire, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, some Nazis (odd not be in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”) – and suddenly: “In 1956, feminist Simone de The Second Sex and Mandalines books were banned by Beauvoir.
“Second Floor” is 928 pages, the packaged weight of the book is almost a kilogram.
This one kilogram of unpleasant truth was banned by the Vatican in 1956.
I read this non-fiction book once.
…Hercules is spinning at Omphale’s feet, and he is bound by desire. So why can’t Omphala seize power over him?
… Medea is forced to kill her children in anger, only to get revenge on Jason. “This wild myth shows that a woman can achieve terrifying influence only through her connection with a child.”
… In the comedy “Lysistratus” Aristophanes presents a funny assembly of women (I’m telling you from the beginning). Sabine women must be whipped with leather straps to bring them down.
In other words, woman is always in this world – a relative being, a man’s body has meaning in itself, and a woman – without a man – lacks this independent meaning. And even a male’s biological need for a female does not give the woman any social freedom. Backwards. It makes him an even more attractive, desirable but wordless and sometimes screaming prey.
But here at least it’s clear why the Vatican disliked this book so much.
But Simone de Beauvoir’s “Tangerine” is just a novel. But the novel did not like the Vatican either.
Here is the first quote I found from “Mandarin”, neither about sex nor love: “No, today I am not given to know my death; Not today or any other day. I will die for others, but I will not see how I will die myself.
This is a poem.
They just need to “break” differently:
Not,
not today
made me know my death; not today
and not another day.
i will die for others
But I myself will not see how I will die.
“As long as the original author lives, it’s always scandalous,” this strange woman once said.
He walks on the street, tall, thin. Intentionally dressed outdated. He doesn’t have glasses. He does not need them: he already sees everything perfectly.
In his youth – out of defiance, arrogance – he often wore shoes with wooden soles (which means he hit them hard while walking). Wear boring clothes, especially worn. He had only one suit for special occasions.
With age, she began to dress differently, but in everything else she was still uncompromising.
“However, I didn’t care. After falling off the bike, I was missing a tooth, the hole was visible, and I didn’t even think about filling it in: why? I’m already old, I’m thirty-six.”
This is funny.
Not thirty-six years old. But he does not want to evaluate himself differently.
… Simone de Beauvoir has a strong childhood memory. There, the mother is inaccessible and mutable to him, like a cloud or an angel. The little girl rejoices, almost falls in love. Years later he remembers how the little boy sat on his mother’s lap, sitting in this cloud of scents and hugs and kissing everything, kissing his mother’s young, fresh skin.
Mom, how far away from wooden-soled shoes and worn plain clothes. Mom comes in at night to kiss him goodbye (to his child it seems like it’s only nine at night, most likely, but this “childish time” for adults, they are probably going somewhere, so mom is dressed ). A mousse of green lace, a lilac flower on the bodice or on the shoulder, and sometimes a black dress.
This is described in another book not included in the Vatican’s prohibition column.
But how much love and addiction is there.
“When is he [мама] angry, then made “terrible eyes”; I was afraid of that angry glow that had stripped away the beauty of her face. I needed your smile.”
How beautiful? Real?
Real. It was completely different if we hadn’t read about these lips in another book (“A Die Too Easy”):
“Death had a mother’s face and her dreadful grin, her reassuring smile.”
Ah, these writers are not like humans. All they want is to go astray, rhyme with inevitable death, discredit, approve, or rather eat.
“How easy it would be to live in if the world we live in was edible! Even as an adult, I sometimes had the urge to pluck blooming almonds or bite into a piece of caramel-almond sunset. Neon signs against the dark New York sky made me sadly incapable of swallowing. Sounds like huge flavors.
We’ve all thought about it. But we are not talking about it, we are not Simon – we know: the earth cannot be swallowed. One day it will devour you. And he wanted to win this world.
When Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986, twenty years had passed since the Vatican ban was lifted from her two books.
Sartre, the best and longest, had long been asleep in the Montparnasse cemetery, in a tomb where, like a special irony of fate, the windows of his little apartment looked out.
But he dies not at home, in one of the Paris clinics.
They say that the staff could not believe that Simone de Beauvoir herself died: no one came to her and no one asked about her. Yet another oddity: Why don’t the staff know it was Simone de Beauvoir who died? Isn’t her name on the hospital records and probably in her bed?
Somewhere about this, I read a kind of shaky truth, a touch: “Who dares to suggest that Simone might grow old and die?” It’s funny again. And how could anyone have imagined it would be otherwise?
I don’t think you’re going to like all this post-mortem emotional fuss.
While writing this text, I got on one of the networks, started surfing the tape, and immediately encountered an angry post from my girlfriend.
“… I realized a long time ago that the scariest mirrors and the most nightmarish lighting happen either in the dressing rooms of major clothing stores or in beauty parlors. So, exactly where you expect to find yourself a little more attractive than usual.
The sound of Simone de Beauvoir’s wooden floors can be heard directly there.
I laughed and suddenly thought that maybe Simone de Beauvoir wanted to see herself in every text. Like in the dressing room. In every eye. In every window. And in every book.
Defective.
He seemed to take a strange pleasure from it. Because in imperfection there is true honesty.
“The world is equally sad everywhere,” he once wrote.
Maybe that’s what he wanted? Being sad, untidy and uncomfortable like the earth. Yes, yes: “I will die for others, but I will not see for myself how I will die.”