Word: petrement
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris, to Dr. Bernard Weil and his wife, Selma. By Petrement's account Simone's were model parents--cultured yet unaffected, proud of their children's successes but not pushy, fun-loving and emotionally honest. Simone and her brother Andre, a precocious methematician who currently works at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton, enjoyed a materially privileged and psychologically peaceful childhood--spending early years and summers in the country and benefitting from the best of Parisian schooling during their teens and early twenties...
During the four or five years of the first World War, however, the Weils moved about often, following Simone's father to the various outposts where the French Army stationed him. There Simone's mother devoted herself to nursing her physician husband and his comrades. So one could argue (Petrement certainly seems to) that from observing her mother's altruism, the germ of self-sacrifice was planted early in this otherwise normal, gifted child...
...Simone nevertheless hurried to involve herself in the struggle for trade union unification, participating in demonstrations of the unemployed in nearby St. Etienne. There she gained a reputation in the local national press as a Moscow agent. (Weil never joined the Communist or any other party, and Petrement only hints that she may have wanted to at one time. In any case, what began as a vigorous skepticism about the value of political reforms and party discipline later grew into a repudiation of any faith in political goals, either revolutionary or reformist...
Although Weil's last ideas mark a certain defeatism--a final submission to the need for inner faith--Petrement's presentation suggests that Simone was headed along this path all along, and her primary motives and objective in life, both intellectual and emotional, are tied up with this spiritual journey...
...philosopher Alain, who had exerted such a formative influence on her ideas about life fifteen years earlier, might have answered her plea with this definition of truth (paraphrased from his informal "doctrine" by Petrement): "an idea is not true by itself, independent of the thinker: it is not right to speak of a true idea but rather of true thoughts, of true men and women." Simone Weil lived this definition. And it may be that in the end she feld that only letting herself die could she continue to live her truth