Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a teacher, classical scholar, philosopher, political activist and seeker of the truth. She confronted the rootlessness of modern life and the death of the spirit in an age of materialism. Her writing was visionary and her vision, radical.Born in France, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Weil inspired T.S. Eliot to say of her, "We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." Today, nearly sixty years after her death, her work has, perhaps, an even greater immediacy and relevance. This book is a collection of the best of her writings from The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty and Gravity and Grace.
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"The only great spirit of our time." -- Albert Camus
About the Author
SIMONE WEIL, according to Andre Gide, was "the most spirtiual writer of this century." Born in 1909, the daughter of well to do French-Jewish parents, she died in England in 1943, the victim of self-starvation, an extraordinary gesture made to show solidarity with her compatriots across the Channel under the Nazi occupation.
She grew up in Paris and was accepted to the Ecole Normale at the age of seventeen, scoring first in the extrance exam to Simone de Beauvior's second. Three years later, Weil passed her exams "brilliantly" and became a teacher.
She threw herself into a spirtiual and political life with such zeal that some have since referred to her as "Saint Simone". She was always writing down her thoughts and as Sir Richard Rees wrote in his introduction to First and Last Notebooks "Taken all all together, the notebooks provide an unselfconscious and unintentional self-portrait of one of the most remarkable monds and characters of this century."
Weil lived it the middle of a world in physical and spiritual upheaval. This became her prime concern and she wrote, "The conditions of modern life destroy the mind-body equilibrium in everything, in thought and in action--in all actions: in work, in fighting...and in love which is now a luxurious sensation and a game....In its aspect, the civiliation we live in overwhelms the human body. Mind and body have become strangers to one another. Contact has been lost."
She confromted the rootlessness of modern life and the death of the spirit in an age of materialism. Her vision was radical, her writing visionary. Today, sixty years after her death, her work has, perhaps, an even greater immediacy and relevance.
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71 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oscar and the maiden,
This review is from: Simone Weil Reader (Paperback)
An amazing collection of essays by one of the most brilliant philosopher/social critic/spiritual writer's of all time. Weil's writing can be extremely dense, I occassionally had to read sentences three or four times to understand what was going on. The problem is not really that her sentences are complicated, but rather that the ideas she is putting forth are, at times, heinously difficult to grasp. When you do finally get it though, Wow! I could alomost feel the wrinkles in my cerebellum changing course. Her analysis of human "rights", her thoughts "on personality", and her assessment of the spiritual aspects of the human soul are astounding. She has an uncanny ability to dismantle social power matrixes, lay them at your feet, and challenge you to re-evaluate your own interaction with them. As a fan of Greek literature I also recommend the essay "The Iliad, a Poem of Force" as one of the more lucid deconstructions of that work. This is a fine anthology which, due to it's chronological orginization and well-written introduction, also give fascinating insight into the growth and development of thought processes of a truly remarkable woman. All in all, this anthology is just extremely cool, though difficult to plow through, it is worth every moment.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simone Weil Reader,
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