At the end of her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), the French atheist and Marxist-feminist author of The Second Sex (1949), pondered her death, and wrote these terribly sad words: “ I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and sudd