Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change

A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then we had better know it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “to act responsibly.” And yet we don’t. We encounter each other at points, as points, and promise each other timelines, denying our temporality, denying that time is the measure of change. In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across… read article