Marcel on Disponibilité and Indisponibilité: Handy, Unhandy,
Available, Unavailable  Continuing with the theme of
disposability, here is a brief passage from The Mystery of
Being, vol. 1.  Marcel comments on his own terms.  We come up
against a notion here which seems to me of capital importance
but for which it is difficult to find an idiomatic English
equivalent—at least neither I, nor the English translator of my
previous work, Being and Having, managed to do so. The French
terms I use are disponibilité and indisponibilité.  Literally,
in English, one would render these as availability and
unavailability, but it might sound more natural if one spoke of
handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that of having
or not having, in a given contingency, one’s resources to hand
or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is unhandy;
I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls made
upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals
for help that may be made to him by the unfortu