“…His philosophy inspired a generation, then drifted out of fashion.
Now, 100 years after his birth, the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre are once again highly relevant – and bitterly controversial.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s grave is a modest affair, befitting a man who (so he claimed) hated monuments and cared nothing for his own legacy.
Beside the plain, white marble tombstone in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris this week, well-wishers had left a vase of plastic flowers, a pot of geraniums, five roses, a pigeon feather, scores of pebbles and five unused Métro tickets.
On the grave – also the last resting place of Sartre’s lifelong “companion” Simone de Beauvoir – there was an anonymous, scribbled note: …
…”To JPS and SB, for your sincere writing and for the meaning you gave to life.
Thank you for leaving your mark on history.”
What the Métro tickets were for is unclear. Perhaps Le Petit Homme (the little man) and Castor (the beaver) might like to return to the Café de Flore to drink coffee, smoke Gauloises, discuss their many infidelities, mock their friends …
… and ponder, from a new perspective, the difference between “being and nothingness”.
Jean-Paul Sartre – philosopher, novelist, playwright, polemicist, political activist … the secular messiah of existentialism …
… the prototype of the “engaged” French intellectual – died 25 years ago this year.
He was born 100 years ago next Tuesday.
His funeral in April 1980 provoked an outpouring of grief more usually associated with actors than with ugly, chain-smoking, foul-smelling, squint-eyed philosophers.
More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Paris to follow his coffin …
…and – in the phrase of one fan at the time – to “demonstrate against Sartre’s death”….”
go to source/story>>>The Second Coming Of Sartre – Features, Books – The Independent
