A BOOKISH THREAD

Over the years, the self-made genre of intellectual and spiritual autobiography has become my favourite one. I should have known this earlier. Books like Augustine’s *Confessions* and Boethius’ *Consolation of Philosophy* were the ones I liked most in college.

I felt like I could understand them. Dante’s *Vita Nuova,* for all of its poetic melodrama, was also an early favourite. But it was not until I read Ben-Ami Sharfstein’s *The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought*...

... that I finally began to make more sense out of my love of biography and autobiography in philosophy. Then I read Ray Monk’s *The Duty of Genius,* the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which cemented the genre for me.

Reading the Miles Davis autobiography, narrated by Quincy Troupe, also opened a portal for artistic and musical autobiography, but I have not pursued that as fully as I ought.

I would include the reading of published correspondence and also interviews, mainly the ones published in Paris Review but also the short books that are entirely comprised of interview transcripts.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s *The Words* is among my favourite volumes as well—his story of losing his religious faith has always struck as an atheist’s conversation story.

Anyhow, aside from my much belated need to finally read a volume of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt’s correspondence and the latter’s biography by Elisabeth Young-Breul, today I came across a book that promises to join and expand my understanding of this niche of my own making:

*Adieux* by Simone de Beauvoir, wherein she writes a biography of the last decade of Sartre’s life (and, apparently, uses it to interpret his life and thought) and then publishes...

... a long conversation between them in which she hesitates and ultimately chooses to not disclose to him that he is dying. So much for Existentialism, I guess.

When I bought the book, my credit card chip would not work. I told the nice, bookish cashier that it was expiring.

I then added the irony of my credit card’s expiration making itself notable as it allows me to purchase a book where the author cannot tell her beloved interlocutor that he is about to expire. She had a good sense of humour about it and I said “death comes for us all” and left.

Here are some pictures of the cover:

FINIS