[Here is] what strikes me in Simone de Beauvoir, what makes her worth reading and thinking about time after time. Her conflicts are central—for women, for men, for our age—personally as well as politically. Throughout her books there is a tension between being alone, solitary, an individual, and being a part of a friendship, a love, a political group, the world. The issue here is one's ultimate aloneness, but also one's inability as a human being to do anything that is not a social act…. There is an essential ambiguity, which we all share, between our real freedom to remake our world, with the responsibility that this implies, and the constraints which at all moments impinge against us. De Beauvoir felt both sides of this ambiguity sharply. She talked about transcendence, acting on one's continually increasing liberties, or its obverse, oppression; or, in psychological terms, about...