Wintering

About the Book

D. Julius Loeb alternately lives and works on islands in the American Pacific Northwest and the South Pacific. An oil painter and builder, Loeb has successfully avoided meaningful work most of his life.  He did succumb to multiple relationships (marriages and otherwise) with some of the world’s most remarkable women.  Loeb has the great fortune to leave his mark on the planet through four wonderful children who luckily all take after their mothers.  Lately Loeb, the ever-lucky rogue, has been further blessed with grandchildren and the promise of more.  Life, he says, is too important to be taken seriously.

About the Author

About the Author and this book

This second novel draws upon circumstances of detachment which present themselves in both the solitude of youthful ideology and in the weariness of a late autumn evening alone. 

I first read Sartre before I could properly pronounce his name.  Thumbing through assigned school reading was rice paper compared with the existentialists’ thick pages of unsentimental writing, distended with ideas.

In August 1975 “Sartre At Seventy: An Interview” The New York Review of Books Vol.22 Number 13:  Sartre was asked: Do you have No feelings of Rebellion? 

Sartre answered:  “Who, or what, should I be rebelling against? Don't take this for stoicism—although, as you know, I have always had sympathy for the Stoics. No, it's just that things are the way they are and there's nothing I can do about it, so there's no reason for me to be upset.”

Speaking about women: “My relations with women have always been the best because sexual relations, properly speaking, allow for the objective and the subjective to be given together more easily. Relations with a woman, even if one is not sleeping with her—but if one has or if one could have—are richer. First of all, there is a language which is not speech, which is the language of hands, the language of faces. I am not talking about the language of sex properly speaking. As for language itself, it comes from the deepest place, it comes from sex, when a love relationship is involved. With a woman, the whole of what one is is present.”

Sartre said: “In certain cases I like to be alone very much. Before the war, on certain evenings when Castor [i.e., de Beauvoir] was not free, I liked very much to go eat alone at the "Balzar," for example: I felt my solitude.”

This novel is about a guy feeling his solitude.  Neither youthful nor old, the boy who climbed to explore ideas is still alive in our protagonist.  Around a not too distant turn, await grey beard nostalgic recollections.   One thing is constant.  He is still alive.  He has freedom of choice and he has acted as his conscience directed.  So why is it that events have left him ravenous for deeper feeling in his papier-mâché existence?

Simone De Beauvoir was Sartre’s life long friend, mistress, wife (only the two of them could define their relationship).  In her diary recording Sartre’s lingering death (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre) De Beauvoir said:

"My death will not bring us together again. This is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long."