Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre
“We are our choices.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
I was finishing high school (in Montenegro) when I got mesmerized with writings of Sartre, reading his play "The devil and the Good Lord".
A few years later, at the Actors Studio (NYC), in Vivian Nathan’s eminent workshop, I had a great time playing character Jessica in Sartre’s "Dirty Hands" with my colleague actor and dear friend (late) Avram Ludwig.
But more than any other of his works, Sartre’s 1944 drama ”No exit”, confirmed my respect for his enormous talent of writing.
“A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.”
Jean-Paul Sartre,
refusing the Nobel Prize,(October 22, 1964)
The fascinating thing happened at the end of his earthly life ... A CHANGE OF HEART.
(from the introduction of the book :
“Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews - Jean-Paul Sartre, Benny Lévy”)
“In March of 1980, just a month before Sartre’s death, Le Nouvel Observateur published a series of interviews, the last ever given, between the blind and debilitated philosopher and his assistant, Benny Levy. Readers were scandalized and denounced the interviews as distorted, inauthentic, even fraudulent. They seemed to portray a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions and rejected his most intimate friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. This man had cast aside his own fundamental beliefs in the primacy of individual consciousness, the inevitability of violence, and Marxism, embracing instead a messianic Judaism. No, Sartre’s supporters argued, it was his interlocutor, the ex-radical, the orthodox, ultra-right-wing activist who had twisted the words and thought of an ailing Sartre to his own ends.
Or had he?”
Mr. Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, my dear friend, yes, we are our choices.
