Beauvoir’s collecting and diary-keeping expressed her consuming appetite for experience

Evidence

Her appetite extended to collecting things, including many gifts and souvenirs from her travels. When she finally moved from hotel rooms to a proper apartment in 1955, it quickly filled up with ‘jackets and skirts from Guatemala, blouses from Mexico … ostrich eggs from the Sahara, lead tom-toms, some drums that Sartre had brought back from Haiti, glass swords and Venetian mirrors that he had bought in the rue Bonaparte, a plaster cast of his hands, Giacometti’s lamps’. Her diary-keeping and memoir-writing also reflected an urge to acquire and relish everything that came into her grasp. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 387

Categorization

• XREF: Links to her later existentialist ethics built on appetite and desire rather than abstract duty. — connects to: Beauvoir’s existential appetite extended to wanting to consume the entire world — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 386