poor substitute

[fflo]

I'm reading about Simone Weil. Pretty sure she's the right Simone.

I am a woman of steel.

Below is something from a worth-a-read (great draw-you-in opening) review Susan Sontag did in 1963 of a posthumously-published book of Weil's essays. Actually it looks like this review appeared in the first-ever issue of the New York Review of Books: Volume 1, Number 1. At one point Sontag refers to Weil's "anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church," which is a fun/funny way of putting it. Anyway, here's the excerpt I'm 'cerptin' for ya:

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation — like Kleist's, like Kierkegaard's — was Simone Weil's. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world — and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Comments

[paperkingdoms]

I read a little sliver of Simone Weil's writing a few years ago, at a point when she sort of resonated. I don't remember much, now, except that she resonated. One of those different establishments, but similar issues sorts of things. I might have to make it back for more of her, someday.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

I haven't ever read Simone, and have to rush by this morning without clicking the links, but what a fascinating quote.

In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world -- and mystery is just what the securee possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies.

Dang! That's hot. I miss Susan Sontag.

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

Okay. I read the whole text of your first link. I'll have to read the second one later because I have too many thoughts swirling around in my head after reading the first link. I know I'd heard of Weil somewhere along the way, probably in my college days, but I didn't remember much about her.

I will say, however, that I do really like this bit from your exceprt of the excrpt of Susan Sontag's review:

No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

gawd, me too

i am totally with her

just put this poem, found browsing greatpoets this a.m., in my .plan (bet you like it):

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek---
it is the same---
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against the cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

-- Jane Hirshfield