Life
She did not hesitate to go straight to the source to find out what she wanted to know, going so far as to spend one month in a house of prostitution before writing Un mois chez les filles (A Month With the Girls) and, later, to disguise herself as a young monk for a month for Un mois chez les hommes (A Month With the Men.) She wrote, incidentally, that she had to elude the advances of a monk from Mount Athos.
Unexpectedly, Choisy underwent a religious conversion. She then tried to withdraw her work from publication and buy up any copies in circulation. Her reasoning was that her writing did not satisfy the criterion of three restraints, associated with Socrates: truth, usefulness, and kindness. She instead devoted herself to psychoanalysis, which she considered to be capable of a lasting contribution to the happiness of mankind. This was when she founded the "Psyché" movement, in which a young man named Jacques Lacan would begin his career. After her conversion, she still felt the urge to write. She produced the history of her conversion, On the way to God You Meet the Devil First, and the very moving Tales For My Little Girl (and For the Others). In the latter, the topic of death takes on a particular importance, even though a discreet humor remains present. In a final nod to her suridealistic youth, the hero of one of the stories is a nitrogen atom. He wonders about his own existence, experiences unhappy relationships, and ends up in a bombing.
Read more about this topic: Maryse Choisy
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,”Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?” If I don’t know such basic things about myself, who does?”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)