Word: fiedler
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Baffled Love. Simone Weil's whole life, writes Fiedler, was a series of acts of self-dedication that fizzled into lugubriousness. As a young schoolteacher she rushed into left-wing movements and marched in picket lines, but the authorities refused to take her seriously enough to fire her. In order to "understand" the workingman, she took a job as a factory hand in an automobile plant (a decision "fundamentally silly, the illusion of the Vassar girl of all lands," says Fiedler), where she suffered not as a worker but as an intellectual, and ended up by getting pleurisy...
...fighter she deplored reliance on force. Yet today Simone Weil is looked upon by an increasing audience as one of the outstanding religious figures of her time.* In the current issue of the Jewish monthly, Commentary, is a penetrating study of the "Saint of the Absurd" by Leslie A. Fiedler, associate professor of humanities at the University of Montana...
...continually involving herself in politics, but, says Fiedler, "unlike true political or social thinkers, she is never concerned with the solution to war or poverty, but always with their use. She fears more than anything the proffered hope, Utopian or 'practical,' which diverts the attention of the workers toward the future, toward consolation; the politics of redemption is, like any false religion, an opiate...
Final Despair. "Agony," Simone Weil once said, "is the supreme 'dark night' which even the perfect need to attain absolute purity; and to attain that end, it has to be bitter agony." Writes Professor Fiedler: "This is a difficult doctrine in all times and places, and it is especially alien and abhorrent in present-day America where anguish is regarded as vaguely unAmerican, something to be grown out of, or analyzed away, even expunged by censorship; and where certainly we do not look to our churches to preach the uses of affliction. It is consolation, 'peace...
...coloratura. At the end of her first song, the audience was still too surprised to raise more than warm applause. The second, Tumpa (Earthquake), brought cheers; after the third, a pyrotechnical Inca Hymn to the Sun, the applause and cheers swelled to a roar for encores. Guest Conductor Arthur Fiedler, who had a plane to catch, was obliged to break up the demonstration by launching his orchestra into Tchaikovsky's noisy March Slav...