Albert Camus, a Nobel laureate himself and buddy of many titanic natures, thought-about Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) “the one nice spirit” of the epoch.
Earlier than she died a dying of solidarity in an English sanatorium, refusing to take extra meals than her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France have been rationed, earlier than she enlisted to struggle for freedom within the Spanish Civil Warfare, the twenty-six-year-old Weil took a 12 months’s depart of absence from her college instructing submit to labor incognito in two automobile factories to be able to higher perceive the plight of the working class. “Though I undergo from all of it,” she wrote to one in every of her college students, “I’m extra glad than I can say to be the place I’m… I’ve escaped from a world of abstractions.”
Regardless of the lengthy wearying hours, regardless of the savage complications that accompanied her all through her brief life, Weil by no means lapsed on her correspondence, writing lengthy passionate letters to household, mates, colleagues, and college students. Included within the posthumous quantity Seventy Letters (public library) is her poignant response to her scholar asking for recommendation on the way to govern her younger coronary heart.
Weil begins with an admonition in opposition to mistaking sensory pleasure for actionable feeling:
There are individuals who have lived by and for nothing however sensations… What they are surely is the dupes of life; and as they’re confusedly conscious of this they at all times fall right into a profound melancholy which they will solely assuage by mendacity miserably to themselves. For the truth of life is just not sensation however exercise — I imply exercise each in thought and in motion. Individuals who reside by sensations are parasites, each materially and morally, in relation to those that work and create… who don’t search sensations [but] expertise in truth a lot livelier, profounder, much less synthetic and more true ones than those that search them.
The gravest consequence of being enslaved by sensation, Weil observes, is that it reduces actuality to your personal sensory expertise and hurls you right into a sort of terrible selfing that makes love unimaginable — for love, as Iris Murdoch so memorably put it, is “the extraordinarily troublesome realisation that one thing apart from oneself is actual.” An epoch earlier than Annie Dillard cautioned that “the life of sensation is the life of greed,” Weil writes:
The cultivation of sensations implies an egoism which revolts me. It clearly doesn’t stop love, however it leads one to think about the folks one loves as mere events of pleasure or struggling and to overlook utterly that they exist in their very own proper. One lives amongst phantoms, dreaming as a substitute of residing.
She then turns to like itself:
I’ve no recommendation to offer you however no less than I’ve some warnings. Love is a severe factor, and it usually means pledging one’s personal life and in addition that of one other human being, for ever. Certainly, it at all times signifies that, until one of many two treats the opposite as a plaything; and in that case, which is a quite common one, love is one thing odious. In the long run, you see, the important level in love is that this: that one human being feels a significant want of one other human being — a necessity which is or is just not reciprocal and is or is just not enduring, because the case could also be.
The value of this equivalence, Weil argues, is the problem of reconciling love and freedom — an issue Rilke addressed with lyrical poignancy, and one Octavio Paz captured in his beautiful depiction of affection as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” Reflecting on the best way love moors folks to at least one one other, Weil provides:
Love appears to me to contain an much more terrifying threat than that of blindly pledging one’s personal existence; I imply the danger, if one is the thing of a profound love, of changing into the arbiter of one other human existence.
Half a century later, James Baldwin would echo the sentiment in his admonition that “loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.”
Complement with the nice Zen trainer and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love and poet Donald Corridor on the secret to lasting love, then revisit Weil on attention and grace, how to make use of your suffering, and how to be a complete human being.
