Brief an D

You turn eighty-two. You have shrunk six centimeters, you weigh only forty-five kilos, and still you are beautiful, graceful, and desirable. We have now lived together for fifty-eight years, and I love you more than ever. Thus begins this story of love, written by the eighty-three-year-old philosopher and social theorist André Gorz in the form of a long letter. He reflects on the fifty-eight years of living with D., an Englishwoman he met in Lausanne in 1947, who then became his wife. What emerges is a retrospective of a very special kind on a good half-century of philosophical, political, and journalistic work, during which D. always stood by his side. Yet at the very beginning of this reflection is the question: Why are you so little present in what I have written, while our connection has been the most important thing in my life? This book is short; it only deals with the most important things. The suicide of the couple at the end of September 2007 appears in a completely different light after reading the book. Neither of them wants to survive the other, Gorz writes at the end of his letter. With their joint suicide, both have escaped the necessity of having to exist in this world without the other.