The girl’s daydreamed future self vanishes the moment ordinary reality returns

Evidence

But then everything came loose … never did I broach marriage30 … The next day I thought of it a little while washing. I don’t know why the soapy face I was looking at in the mirror delighted me (the rest of the time I didn’t find myself beautiful) and filled me with hope. I would have considered for hours this misty, tilted face that seemed to be waiting for me from afar on the road to the future. But I had to hurry; once I dried my face, everything was over, and I got back my banal child’s face, which no longer interested me. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘misty face waiting on the road to the future’ figures the transcendence the girl believes she will attain, lost when she is forced back into her everyday girl-self — a haunting image of immanence closing in.