Simone de Beauvoir

A beautiful actress's encounter with a man who claims to be immortal teaches the man how to enjoy life again, and offers the actress an opportunity to be immortal through her performances

A Novel

All Men are Mortal

Ioana Kardos

Well-written. Two stories intertwined by the same existentialist idea developed by Simone de Beauvoir in her works. Still, too pessimistic and sad. The downside of it was that despite my previous perception that life is too short, the author argues that too much time and immortality generates a sort of weariness and man is unable to experience emotions at their utmost intensity. "They don't even want to be happy. They're only too happy to kill time while waiting for time to kill them" (280)

Bob Simone

As it happened, I watched the movie "Network" at the same time that I was finishing this. I really enjoyed that combination. In particular, this allowed me to put the control articulated in that movie into context. Though it is useful to point out what they are, control (TV and corporatocracy, in the case of Network) is not new, and is not a calamity, any more than the mortality of men is a calamity. If the control of TV and corporations feels new, it's only that one is unfamiliar with the previous systems of control that our grandparents lived under. You cannot "defeat" control, itself, any more than the Assyrians could kill Ashur. But you can make space for things to change on the margins. And you, yourself, personally, can survive. Over geological time, things will change. In 2012, Ashur is dead and TV/Corporatocracy rule the world. Does anyone doubt that we are moving in the right direction?

All Men are Mortal A Novel

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