Abstract

This article explores Simone de Beauvoir’s account of old people’s relationship to time in her groundbreaking Old Age. Her dominant view is that, for the old, the past is fixed and it fixes us. Here this picture of a frozen past is contrasted with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the past is what gives “the atmosphere” to our present, providing its affective texture. This article highlights alternative and parallel strands in Beauvoir’s own thinking that challenge her dominant view.