Simone Weil Bilingual Essays

Contents of Simone Weil: Bilingual Essays: Translator's Note The Greek Pater (Lord's Prayer) & Simone Weil's French Version Love, by George Herbert & A French Translation Profession de Foi Profession of Faith Autobiographie spirituelle Spiritual Autobiography Réflexions sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l'amour de Dieu Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies as a Way to Come to a Love for God Cette Guerre est une guerre de religion This War is a Religious War Réflexions sans ordre sur l'amour de Dieu Various Reflections on the Love of God Bibliography Postscript On the thirteenth of April [1942] Simone Weil wrote to Joë Bousquet . . . "I was very moved . . . to see that you had paid real attention to some pages I had shown you . . . Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." (In Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, tr. Raymond Rosenthal, p. 462) On Simone Weil Diogenes Allen, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Princeton University: She was a spokesperson on behalf of striking workers, a volunteer teacher in night schools for railroad workers, and an active trade unionist. By working in factories and on farms she sought to understand how the oppression of work could be alleviated and the social hierarchy dismantled. She once gave shelter to Trotsky (and is said to have argued him into the ground over the nature of social oppression), was a soldier at the front in the Spanish Civil War, sought dangerous service in World War II and served with the Free French in London. If personal heroism is a recommendation . . . Weil's credentials are impeccable. ("Liberation from Illusion," www.religion-online.org) Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature 1957: I am still convinced that Simone Weil is the only great mind of our times . . . For my part, I would be satisfied if I could say that, with the humble means at my disposal, I helped to make known, to disseminate, her work, whose full impact we have yet to measure. (www.hermenaut.com) T. S. Eliot, Nobel Prize in Literature 1948: In trying to understand her, we must not be distracted - as is only too likely to happen on first reading - by considering how far, and at what points, we agree or disagree. We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints. (Preface, The Need for Roots, p. vi) Gustave Thibon, French Catholic lay theologian: People have found it possible to speak of a 'pathological predisposition to suffering' in connection with Simone Weil. That does not amount to very much: purely psychological explanations, when applied to anyone of such dimensions, suggest a garment that is absurdly tight and splits in all directions . . . She sailed for New York in May 1942. Shortly before our separation, I saw her again in Marseilles . . . To recall the details of this last conversation and to make of it just a memory among others seems to me a profanation today; things which pass beyond time cannot be confined to the memory. I will only say that I had the impression of being in the presence of an absolutely transparent soul which was ready to be reabsorbed into original light. I can still hear Simone Weil's voice in the deserted streets of Marseilles as she took me back to my hotel in the early hours of the morning; she was speaking of the Gospel; her mouth uttered thoughts as a tree gives its fruit, her words did not express reality, they poured it into me in its naked totality; I felt myself to be transported beyond space and time and literally fed with light. (Simone Weil as We Knew Her, tr. Emma Craufurd, pp. 122-123)