flâneur

The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 4,414 words · saved by 1 readers

It’s a conundrum of the philosopher’s biography that most basic human needs were alien to her.

The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but since her death, at thirty-four, in 1943, it has inspired an almost cultlike following among readers who share her hunger for grace, and for what she called “decreation”—deliverance from enthrallment to the self. Eminent theologians have revered Weil (Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Pope Paul VI), and so have…

saved by

related reading