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:
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with people being happy, but there’s more to life than turning on and screwing to Ravel’s Bolero.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)
“Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)