From Carol Ascher’s Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom:
[b]The theme of our mortality, ‘the scandal of finiteness’, threads its way through all of Simone de Beauvoir’s works. From this perspective, her fiction and essays chronicle her attitude toward her own and others’ aging and death. As she writes in different ways at different times, it is death which shapes life—one’s own death as well as the death of others…One may try to transcend death through acting on a value which risks life. But it is death itself which makes this value appear transcendent. Without death, all life’s undertakings lose their meaning.
How can one position oneself intellectually and emotionally toward this ‘scandal,’ as de Beauvoir likes to call it? How can one face this outrage, which simultaneously gives life its meaning?[/b]
On the other hand, one might equally suggest this is a classic example of someone who thinks too much. Is life and death really all that complicated? There have, after all, been literally hundreds of millions of men, women and children who have already lived and died. And regarding the vast majority of them…let’s be blunt…who cares, right?
We are oblivous to them and so it is as though [from our own perspective] they had never even existed at all. Which, of course, given enough time, is the fate of us all. Therefore “scandal” is no less a fiction [a word we invented to rationalize a particular emotional and psychological state] than any other attitude or point of view we might have toward death and dying. All “positions” here are [eventually] interchangable and superfluous. No less so than the actual lives we live. We give “meaning” to these mundane, material relationships only because we can.
Besides, one can just as easily imagine the “scandal of infinity”—not being able to die when our lives have been reduced to an excruciating, unbearable agony. In other words, there are surely things worse than death. Even though many of us [situated comfortably as we may well be now] can’t imagine them.
Or:
From Colin Wilson’s The Outsider:
[b]The Hemingway short stories after 1930 often contain sentences that can be taken as fragments of the Hemingway credo; there is to begin with, Frederick Henry when Catherine is dying:
‘Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn…they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.’
Or the reflections of the heartless cripple in “The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio”:
‘Religion is the opium of the people…and now economics is the opium of the people, along with patriotism…What about sexual intercourse, was that an opium of the people? But drink was a sovereign opium, oh, an excellent opium…And some people prefer the radio, another opium of the people’.
There is the old waiter of “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”, who prays: ‘Hail nothing, full of nothing, nothing is with thee.’
Here the encounter with death has become an encounter with the meaninglessness of life, an encounter with nothingness. The only value that remains is courage; Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea with his ‘a man can be destroyed but not defeated.’ And the value of courage is doubtful. Death negates it and the causes that inspire it are usually ‘opium of the people.’[/b]
And:
[b]The examples Hemingway selects for his ‘field of observation’ are all violent and bloody:
‘The first thing you found about the dead was that, hit quickly enough, they died like animals. I do not know, but most men die like animals, not men…’
Speaking of natural death, he comments: ‘So now I want to see the death of any so-called humanist…and see the noble exits they make.’
“The Natural History of The Dead” is hemingway’s clearest exposition of the Existentialist position, and the key sentence, ‘most men die like animals, not men,’ is his answer to the humanist notion of the perfectibility of man. He cannot believe in God…because the idea looks thin against the raw facts of existence. The nearest approach to religous ideals in his work is the sentence ‘he should find things he cannot lose.’ This idea is not followed up, or rather, is followed up by a protracted demonstration that there is nothing man cannot lose. This doesn’t mean that life has no value; on the contrary, life is the only value; it is the ideas that are valueless.[/b]
[my emphasis]
