Contingency of personal origin generates Beauvoir’s existential wonder at being oneself

Evidence

Yet these books, ever more tinged with melancholy, also show her resplendent talent for marvelling at life. In Old Age, she writes of gazing at a picture of herself wearing ‘one of those cloche hats and a roll collar’ on the Champs-Elysées in 1929, and feeling amazed at how things that once seemed natural can now look so unfamiliar. In All Said and Done, she describes waking after an afternoon nap and feeling ‘childish amazement — why am I myself?’ Every detail of an individual is unlikely — why did that particular sperm meet that particular egg? Why was she born female? So many things could have been different: ‘I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 987

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘why am I myself’ amazement and radical contingency tie directly to existentialist themes of facticity and the sheer thrownness of existence, connecting to the reader’s own work on how individuals confront contingency. — connects to: Beauvoir’s fiction arose from amazement when reality stops being taken for granted — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 360; Beauvoir saw individual lived experience as irreducibly singular and uncommunicable — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 985
• SEED: The image of impossible contingency (that particular sperm, that particular egg) could anchor a piece on the existentialist sense of absurdity meeting modern genetics, where the odds of any one individual existing are quantifiable.
• DEEPTHINKING: This crystallizes existentialism’s core inversion: contingency, not necessity, is what makes a person’s being feel miraculous and strange — a dense, quietly paradigm-shifting meditation on identity and chance.