Word: weil
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...think Weil was a self-hater?" a student asked me provocatively over Sunday dinner after reading Elizabeth Hardwick's recent New York Times Book Review piece on this new biography of Simone Weil. The questioner was suggesting that Weil, the French Jewish philosopher who died of self-inflicted starvation during the Second World War, was driven in her life and was led to final self-destruction by a sense of racial shame and guilt...
...SIMONE WEIL: A LIFE...
...Simone Weil died Aug. 24, 1943, in a Middlesex, England, hospital. The death certificate satisfied the requirements of science: "myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis." The needs of the law were fulfilled at the official inquiry: "The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed." Neither statement could satisfy those who knew Simone Weil as a philosopher, teacher, factory worker, soldier, writer and friend. Her mind was not a scale to be tipped between sanity and insanity but a fixed crystal that gathered every...
Those who derided Weil as "The Red Virgin" were off the mark. She distrusted all forms of political organization, and shrewdly saw that Marxism was not superior politics but inferior religion. As a writer of rigorously reasoned essays, she stripped rhetoric down to cold realities. Most of her opinions were out of fashion with the European liberals of her generation. Like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, she early on proclaimed the naked truth that there was not a sou's worth of difference between Stalin and Hitler...
...sacrificing without demonstration of self-pity." To prove his thesis Cole relies on a few random interviews conducted "out there," as he describes the field. But, at the risk of throwing doubt on his opening assertion that he is in the tradition of George Orwell, James Agee and Simone Weil, Coles goes no further in briefing us on work and adulthood than any New York Daily News man-in-the-street piece would. And he does so in a more awkward fashion. The grammer is so loose that sentences tend to lack verbs. He tosses in choppy parenthetical phrases that...