Word: weil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Drawing from Hardwick's powerful summary of this troubling figure's 42 years, my company sought a facile, shrinky key to Weil's life history of self-punishment: her insistence as a child that she always carry the heaviest bundles on family trips; her stubborn rejection of all bourgeois fashion and living comforts; her willful insistence--while she held a well-salaried job with the Ministry of Education--to surround herself with only the bare necessities she thought the unemployed could afford...
...even more puzzling to this woman than Simone's lifetime of asceticism was Weil's noble yet awful and haunting death. The end came in forced war-time exile from France, when Simone Weil, frail since childhood and now suffering from tuberculosis, chose to starve herself to death in British hospitals rather than accept more food than prisoners of war were offered inside occupied France. With what one doctor later called "total lucidity of mind" and a saintly air of peaceful self-possession, Weil drove herself to the point where her body could no longer take in enough food...
...turns out, slick interpretations like racial guilt amount to nothing more than cheap shots that totally miss the 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...
Given this highly introspective, sensitive woman and a morally confusing, violent historical background, the answer can by no means be simple. Yet this thorough biography, written by a schoolmate-friend of Weil's and bringing together unpublished fragments of Simone's letters and thoughts that afford fascinating insights into her intellectual and ideological maturation, provides reasoned, judicious evidence that suggests some possibilities...