Word: petrement
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...mark when dealing with Weil. Although she flirted with the thought of converting to Christianity in the years before her death, allegedly telling a friend while in London "if one day I am completely deprived of my will, in a coma, then they ought to baptize me," Simone Petrement makes clear in this thoughtful biography that the Weil family never either stressed nor denied their religious and cultural ancestry...
...suspicious curiosity that drives one to make this stab psychologism cannot be dismissed so easily. The question still remains: what motivated Weil's deliberate self-destruction? Could Weil really have been as sound-mindedly generous and saintly in her suffering as Hardwick asserted in her review, and as Petrement argues throughout this study? Isn't there something just plain wrong with someone who makes a vocation out of subjecting herself to the same oppression that prisoners and workers--whom Weil called "the humiliated layer of the social hierarchy"--had to face? (Compassion is one thing, but self-torture is another...