The Socrates Express

They connected instantly and soon were inseparable. They saw each other nearly every day. They read the same books, saw the same shows, and on weekends went for long drives in the French countryside. They had season subscriptions to the opera and took vacations in Europe and beyond.

Beauvoir felt rejuvenated by the friendship with this woman forty years her junior. “There is such an interchange between us that I lose the sense of my age: she draws me forward into her future, and there are times when the present recovers a dimension that it had lost.” (Beauvoir bristled at suggestions the two were lovers. “We are very very very good friends,” she said.)

It was Sylvie who lifted Beauvoir’s spirits when she stumbled across a negative review. It was Sylvie who helped her navigate the world of young feminism. And it was Sylvie who rescued Beauvoir from depression after Sartre’s death.

She and Sylvie took a cruise through the Norwegian fjords. She began to write again. Says Sylvie: “It was as if she had put it all behind her. She talked about our relationship and said it gave her a taste for life, a reason to live. She said, ‘I don’t live for you, but I live thanks to you, through you.’ And that was the kind of relationship we had.”

3: Stop Caring What Others Think

Something curious and wonderful happens when we age. We no longer care what others think of us. More precisely, we realize they weren’t thinking of us in the first place.

And so it was with Simone de Beauvoir. She grew more sure of herself, more accepting of her idiosyncrasies. More humble, too. She had her Copernican Moment, losing “the childish illusion of standing in the very middle of the world.”

This came as a tremendous relief. We are planets, each of us, not suns. We absorb the light, reflect it. We do not create it.

This sort of de-caring helps explain why old age can be intellectually liberating. “By a curious paradox,” says Beauvoir, “it is often at the very moment that the aged man, having become old, has doubts about the value of his entire work that he carries it to its highest point of perfection.” This was true for Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Verdi, Monet, and others. No longer seeking praise, they were free to doubt their own work and thus, as Beauvoir puts it, “go beyond themselves.”

Consider the fate of one of Beauvoir’s last books. A collection of short stories, The Woman Destroyed, was published on her sixtieth birthday and universally panned. Critics dismissed it as “the bitter expression of an old woman who nobody wanted anymore, either in life or literature.” Beauvoir, unfazed, continued to write.

4: Stay Curious

The problem with the elderly is not that they act too young but that they don’t act young enough. They act like twenty-seven-year-olds when they should be emulating seven-year-olds. Old age is a time to reconnect with curiosity or, better yet, wonder. What is a philosopher, after all, but a seven-year-old with a bigger brain?

“None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm,” Thoreau said. Beauvoir never outlived enthusiasm. She never stopped wondering. She talked about cinema and opera like a professional critic. She read newspapers regularly and discussed world events with authority and genuine passion. She developed a new interest in the Americas. She despised Ronald Reagan. (Nothing keeps decrepitude at bay like a healthy and vigorous hatred.) She met with scholars and journalists, dispensed favors, and saw friends, usually in her trademark red bathrobe.

Pursuits she had abandoned a decade ago interested her again. At age fifty-two, she claimed no interest in seeing a world “emptied of its marvels,” but a decade later was on the road again, confident that “travel is one of the few things that can bring novelty back into our lives.” She subscribed to the playwright Eugène Ionesco’s formula: two days in a new country are worth thirty in familiar surroundings. Travel enabled her to remain open to the world, receptive to its beauty. On the road, she was at peace. “I live in a moment that embraces eternity,” she said. “I forget my own existence.”

5: Pursue Projects

Old age, Beauvoir believed, should rouse passion, not passivity, and that passion must be directed outward. Have projects, not pastimes. Projects provide meaning. As she says: “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.”

Beauvoir was more politically active in her seventies than in her twenties. After decades of hesitancy, she lent her name to many causes. She protested the French wars in Indochina and Algeria, the American one in Vietnam. She intervened on behalf of imprisoned rebels, censored artists, evicted tenants.

She was following a long tradition of elder activism. Voltaire, so bold on the page, only translated that boldness into action late in life. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, at age eighty-nine, was jailed for seven days for taking part in an antinuclear demonstration. (The magistrate offered to exempt Russell from prison if he promised to behave himself. “No, I won’t,” he replied.) Benjamin Spock, the renowned American pediatrician, was convicted in 1968 on charges related to his protesting the Vietnam War. He was eighty years old. “At my age, why should I be afraid to make public protests?” he said. This is one of the advantages of old age: you have more to give and less to lose. “A blazing, fearless passion in an old man’s frail body is a moving sight,” says Beauvoir.