Death nibbles at everything

Let's get beyond. Everything passes; 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit': we'll be past all this some day. We'll have got beyond the camps, and we'll have got beyond my own existence. It's laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each one of us into the bargain. Let's just keep quiet, them, each in his own little hole.

Well, then, why don't they keep quiet? That's the question I asked Robert more than twenty years ago, when I was a student. He laughed at me, but I'm not sure today that he ever completely convinced me. They pretended to believe that humanity is a single, immortal person, that one day it will be rewarded for all its sacrifices, and that I, myself, will receive my due. But I don't accept that: death nibbles at everything. The sacrificed generations won't rise from their graves to take part in the final love feasts; what might console them is that the chosen ones will join them under the earth at the end of a very brief interval spent above it. Between happiness and unhappiness, there isn't perhaps as much difference as one might think.

[...]

'I was thinking today that people are really wrong to torment themselves over anything and everything. Things are never as important as they seem; they change, they end, and above all, when all is said and done, everyone dies. That settles everything.'

'That's just a way of escaping from problems,' Robert said.

I cut him off. 'Unless it's that problems are a way of escaping the truth. Of course,' I added, 'when you've decided that it's life that's real, the idea of death seems like escape. But conversely...'

Robert shook his head. 'There's a difference. The fact of living proves that you've chosen to believe in life; if one honestly believes that death alone is real, then one should kill oneself. Actually, though, even suicides don't think that.'

'It may be that people go on living simply because they're scatterbrained and cowardly,' I said. 'It's easier that way. But that doesn't prove anything either.'

'First of all, it's important that suicide be difficult,' Robert said. 'And then continuing to live isn't only continuing to breathe. No one ever succeeds in settling down in complete apathy. You like certain things, you hate others, you become indignant, you admire – all of which implies that you recognize the values of life.'

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005) pp. 432-433