The Inseparables

by Simone de Beauvoir

We don’t believe what we believe on purpose;

Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me. It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.

I thought to myself, distressed, that in books there are people who make declarations of love, or hate, who dare to say whatever comes into their mind, or heart – why is it so impossible to do the same thing in real life?

And yet she has memories, I said to myself. What are they? And what use does she make of them?

And yet there was only one sky above our heads, only one truth.

She was often late, not because she didn’t care, but because she had too many contradictory cares.

Because Zaza was exceptional, she could not ‘adapt’ – a sinister term, which implied forcing oneself into a prefabricated system in which everyone is allocated their own cell, which is but one among many. Whatever overspills the mould will be tamped back down, or thrown away as waste. Zaza couldn’t fit herself to the mould, and her singularity was crushed. Therein lies the crime.

for Zaza, faith was not, as it is for many, a smug exploitation of God, a way of being right, of self-justifying and fleeing one’s responsibilities, but the painful questioning of a God who remained silent, obscure, hidden.

for us, the novella fulfils the almost sacred task that she attributed to literature: to fight against time, against forgetting, against death, to ‘do justice to this absolute presence of the instant, to this eternity of the instant, which will have been forever’.