For many years, Weil subsisted on a starvation diet, in solidarity with the hungry.
The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but since her death, at thirty-four, in 1943, it has inspired an almost cultlike following among readers who share her hunger for grace, and for what she called “decreation”—deliverance from enthrallment to the self.
Eminent theologians have revered Weil (Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Pope Paul VI), and so have writers of the first rank, especially women (Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Anne Carson, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag). Albert Camus hailed her as “the only great spirit of our time.” T. S. Eliot credited her with a “genius akin to that of the saints.” But Weil herself might have objected to these consecrations as a form of “idolatry,” which she defined as a misguided thirst for “absolute good.” Nothing is so absolute about her as the difficulty of parsing her contradictions. Her writing radiates a cosmic empathy that coexists, sometimes on the same page, with a strain of intolerance blind to life’s tragicomedy. She resists any system that enslaves the individual to a collective, but her own vision of an enlightened society—the subject of her most famous work, “The Need for Roots”—is an autocracy modelled on Plato’s Republic. Weil would gladly have died fighting the Nazis. Yet even as her Jewish family fled the Final Solution, she condemned Judaism with what her biographer Francine du Plessix Gray justly calls “hysterical repugnance.”
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin September 09, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin September 09, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!
Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.