Inseparable

by Simone de Beauvoir

When I was nine, I was a very good girl; I hadn’t always been.

In my early childhood, the tyranny of adults threw me into such raging fits that one day, one of my aunts seriously declared: “Sylvie is possessed by demons.” War and religion had defeated me.

You don’t believe what you believe on purpose: could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?

How many years? How many evenings? Is living nothing more than that: killing one day after the other? Would I be this bored until I died?

“Sylvie, if you don’t believe in God, how can you bear to live?” “But I like living,” I said.