Word: weil
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...course the potential for such as idealist life (I use idealistic both in the sense of "positive" and "ideal-based") could only have flourished with the encouragement of both an understanding family and a social and historical framework that made Weil's ideas and then actions--the constant testing of her will--seem worthy. Weil was blessed with both these supports; thus much of what now appears to be eccentricity sprang, in reality, from inspiring influences...
...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...
...from the very earliest essays she wrote at the Lycee for her intellectual mentor, the philosopher Alain, Weil had stressed the conviction that to make her life worthwhile--to not "waste death," as she once put it--she would have to exert her Will against the seemingly infinite limitations that life presented (her own frail body, her recurring headaches, the constraints on social and political change in her lifetime). This doctrine of Will seems to have provided a mission and to have met her psychological and emotional need for expectation, devotion and objective response...
...therefore seem irrelevant today to ask, as a Harvard lecture series on Simone Weil did last year, "Live Like Her?" But those who encounter her thoughts and deeds through this fine biography will no doubt be haunted by her noble example, perhaps only for a moment--but perhaps for a long while...
...Weil herself left the world upset that people praised her life rather than looking to her works. "Is what she says true?", is the question that, three weeks before her death, she said she wanted posterity to address...