Beauvoir’s existential appetite extended to wanting to consume the entire world

Evidence

The physical lusciousness of life was never a threat to Beauvoir: she could not get enough of it. As a child, she wanted to consume everything she saw. She would gaze greedily into the windows of sweet shops — ‘the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops — green, red, orange, violet — I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me’. She wished the whole universe could be edible, so it could be eaten as Hansel and Gretel ate from the gingerbread house. Even as an adult, she wrote, ‘I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset.’ Travelling to New York in 1947, she felt an urge to eat the neon signs, brightly arrayed against the night sky. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 386

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of wanting to eat neon signs and crunch flowering almond trees is a vivid, quotable anecdote.
• XREF: Connects to existentialist embodied desire/appetite themes that echo in phenomenology, and to Beauvoir’s memoir-writing habit of consuming experience. — connects to: Beauvoir’s collecting and diary-keeping expressed her consuming appetite for experience — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 387

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir’s collecting and diary-keeping expressed her consuming appetite for experience #expands (0.92) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 387