We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are.

A lifetime before she looked back to contemplate how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, the teenage Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) began considering the choices before her in creating herself out of the raw material of her givens — the limiting horizons of her time and place, the vast vista of her mind. (“She thinks like a man,” her father boasted in a haunting testament to both.)

At seventeen, she had passed her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then gone on to study math at the Catholic University in Paris before crossing over to the Sorbonne for a degree in philosophy. She would become only the eighth woman to ever pass the agrégation — the most rigorous exam in the French education system — narrowly losing first place in her class to Sartre.

It was at the Sorbonne where, still in her teens, she began bending her tensile and penetrating mind toward the kind of life she wanted to live and the kind of person she wanted to be. In her journal of that time, later published as the altogether magnificent Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library), she approaches these questions with the oscillation between determination and self-doubt inherent to any great endeavor — for there is no greater creative act than the making of a life.
Punctuating the diary are touching reminders that even exceptional people are not spared the ordinary perturbations of being human — she is in some ways a typical teenager (“My winter was occupied almost uniquely with love and suffering.”) and a typical person (“Unendingly I make resolutions that I never keep.”), and yet what she makes out of all that suffering, all that restlessness, all that yearning is what makes her — what makes anyone — extraordinary.

Finding herself “neither able to accept nor to refuse life,” she peers into her near and faraway future:

I will be twenty years old in a few months. My education will be almost finished. I will have learned, read, seen everything essential and well beyond. I will have lived with my intelligence and my heart and known a rather wide world. I will even have begun to think by myself; there will be no wasted time. But then it will be advisable to put myself to work. If I live, I must fully accept the game; I must have the most beautiful life. I don’t know why I am here, but since I remain here, I will construct a beautiful edifice.

Then she reaches for the building blocks. Deeming her suffering “useless,” she resolves to rise above it and aim her life toward “a written work that would say everything, that would analyze souls in minute detail while breathing life into each body.” Aware that this dream would demand of her absolute devotion and absolute discipline, she sets down a series of instructions to herself:

Take risks… Force myself to think for two pages per day… Don’t scatter myself… Don’t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing, and confide in someone who will criticize me and take me seriously.

[…]

I must… clarify my desire and proceed by trial and error in order to prepare what would eventually be a great written work… Analyze, understand, and descend more deeply into myself… It is imperative to begin. The questions that interest me must be studied in great depth… It would be necessary… to bring it together with the problems of the personality that love formulates so exactly — the problem of the act of faith that so closely touches the first two problems… It would be necessary to have the courage to write, not to expound ideas but to discover them, not to clothe them artistically but to animate them. The courage to believe in them.

Because there can never be great achievement without great despair, because demanding everything and more of yourself is always wormed with doubt that you might not have it to give, the pendulum keeps swinging between determination and despair. Just after deciding to devote her summer vacation to exploring “the subject of love” as a philosophical problem in “at least thirty condensed and coherent pages,” she plummets again:

What emptiness, what boredom! I hang on to some likable faces, but the too well loved face unendingly smiles at me with sorrow. For what indefinite crossing have I embarked at this precise point in time and space as though in the middle of an immense sea? A crossing whose goal is unknown.

First she uses the lever of her formidable intellect to lift the heavy emotion:

I do not have the right to despair. [If] despair was justified… it demands to be demonstrated — to say, “nothing is worth it,” and to sit idly by with your arms crossed, to have the certainty that no certainty is possible; this is still dogmatism… I too am setting forth a postulate: it is first necessary to seek what is, then, I will see if I must still despair.

But one can never reason one’s way out of a powerful feeling-state — it simply has to be felt, suffered, endured “for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it.” All despair of life is at bottom despair of oneself — something Beauvoir channels with the heightened intensity of adolescent feeling and the lashing censure of ambition:

I have examined my conscience, and here is what I have found: prideful, selfish, and not very good… I often have disgust for myself… I have closed myself in my ivory tower, saying, “Who is worthy of entering here?” I would sometimes open the door and that is all, but there are some people profoundly better than me, and this haughty attitude is stupid. Egoist — I love others only inasmuch as they are me; I easily scorn, and scornful, I no longer try to do my best… How severely I judge and with what right?

In a momentary flash of self-compassion immediately clouded by the same sharp self-excoriation, she adds:

I should suffer with gentleness. I am hard, hard and proud. Become conscious of your own poverty, my girl, and of all of your cowardice!… I have covered my own cowardice with sophisms — oh!

She considers the steps to the courage of creating — a great work, or a great life:

Systematize my thoughts and believe in the value of thought. Read… Delve more deeply. Take all of this seriously. Be more pitiless towards myself and less skeptical with regards to others… Stop only in front of the evidence. Write conclusions once they are acquired… And above all: think for myself.

And yet she locates the key to a fulfilling life not in the mind alone but in the largeness, the fulness, the unabashed openness of the heart:

Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!

Half a century later — having proven these postulates with her life, having written not just one great work but several — she would approach the art of growing old with the same depth of thought and feeling.

Complement with her contemporary Albert Camus on the three antidotes to the absurdity of life and Walt Whitman’s timeless recipe for a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit this omnibus of resolutions for a life worth living borrowed from some extraordinary lives.