As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France.
Several mystical experiences, including Weil’s discovery of the poem ‘Love (III)’ by the 17th-century poet George Herbert led her to embrace Christianity, and many have called for her canonization as a saint.
Love bade me welcome, yet me soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack’d anything. “A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”; Love said, “You shall be he.” “I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear, I cannot look on thee.” Love took my hand and smiling did reply, “Who made the eyes but I?” “Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve.” “And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?” “My dear, then I will serve.” “You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.” So I did sit and eat. Love III George Herbert
Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’ Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent.
- A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
- A political party is an organization designed to exert collective pressures on the minds of all its members.
- The first objective and also ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims.
Weil represents
- total absence of irony in political writings
- sustain campaign against self-interested, narcissistic citizenry
- ethical urgency to the problem of education
- emphasis of first hand knowledge
- belief is technology’s distancing effects would lead to alienation
- congruity of preaching and practice
A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.
She did not want to be a woman … She wanted to disappear. Certain aspects of disappearance had to be concealed from the parents and so her many letters to them are repetitions of the one same glowingly factitious postcard that every good daughter sends home – Dear people what splendid weather thanks for the chocolate I’m making lots of friends here kisses to all – meanwhile she was dying.