From Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, a passage that lingers: she writes of her early failure to think without recourse to language, and of assuming that language was the exact equivalent of reality. Encouraged by grown-ups, whom she took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth, she believed that when they defined a thing, they expressed its very substance, “in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit.” She could conceive of no gaps into which error might fall between the word and its object. When two cousins, sucking sticks of candy-sugar, told her—banteringly—that it was a purgative, their laughter did not override the word’s power. “Nevertheless,” she writes, “the word they had used incorporated itself into my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweet and medicine.”

There is something almost unbearable in the way the child’s mind clings to language, even against experience, and how a single word can forever alter the texture of a memory, making it less luminous, less simple. Reading de Beauvoir, it is impossible not to wonder how many similar compromises still quietly govern the things we believe we love.