Simone Weil: Living and dying in the face of injustice
Hey, there, blog. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy, but that’s not the main reason for my silence. The bigger problem I’m finding it hard to finds words that capture my sense of what’s going on in the world. But I’m still here, and still sometimes finding the energy to read. While I select some of that reading in hopes that it will help me understand and respond to deteriorating conditions, I’m drawn to other texts because I think they might offer some temporary distraction from those conditions.
Here’s an example of what I thought would be the latter. Earlier this week while running I listened to Darryl Pinckney’s conversation with Jarrett Earnest on the first episode of the NY Review’s podcast Private Life. Pinckney was a student and long-time friend of Elizabeth Hardwick. He edited a collection of Hardwick’s stories and another of her essays, and he and Earnest talked about Hardwick and the impact she made on Pinckney and the literary world. It was a fascinating conversation, and reminded me that I had purchased that collection of Hardwick’s essays at a used bookstore earlier this year. This purchase, I should say, was one guided by the I really should read some of that author’s work mandate that often haunts me, but the force of the mandate faded and within a week or two the book had found its way to a pile in my small office.
But listening to that podcast conversation prompted another one of those I really should read some of that author’s work moments, so I retrieved the collection of essays from the pile. While looking through the table of contents, my eyes settled on an essay called, simply enough, “Simone Weil.” Though I don’t know a lot about Weil, I’m fascinated by what I know her life. I’ve read just a bit of her work, and I appreciated Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas when I read it last year. (You can see my notes on Zaretsky’s book on the April 2025 reading page.) And so I settled in to read Hardwick’s essay. It was originally published in the New York Review as a review of Simone Pétremont’s biography of Weil.
I was interested to see what Hardwick thought of Pétremont’s book because I gave up after reading about a third of it. I was simply overwhelmed by the amount of detail, especially since so much of it reflected the close friendship Pétremont and Weil shared. I sometimes feel a bit guilty when I give up on a book, so I was reassured by this comment from Hardwick:
This “life,” written by her friend, Simone Pétremont, is a work of the most serious kind of affection and the most serious dedication. And yet the result of it all is to obscure and blur by detail and by a wish, no doubt unconscious, to retain memories and moments of the normal and natural in a character of spectacular and in many ways abnormal abnormality (p. 251).
So, I thought to myself, perhaps I don’t need to feel so guilty about giving up on the book.
But that’s not why I’m writing this post. I’m writing this post because I decided to read this essay about Weil because I thought it could be a distraction. But Hardwick’s introduction instead brought me back to the challenges we face:
Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth century France, died at the age of thirty-four in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation — an action undertaken at least in part out of a wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation (p. 250).
Months before she died, Weil left her parents in New York City. She had moved there with them in order to escape the Nazis, but decided that she simply had to return to Europe, where she hoped to parachute into France to join the resistance. Her parents begged her to stay with them, but she declined. “If I had several lives, I would have devoted one of them to you, but I have only one life.”
This refusal to eat only what was available to those living in occupied France is only one example of the sacrifices she made during her life. To mention only one other example, she had an outstanding education in philosophy, and then chose in her 20s to spend a year as a common factory laborer so that she might understand the lives of those who didn’t enjoy the advantages that she enjoyed.
What sets her apart from our current ascetics [in 1977, when Hardwick was writing, and I would say today as well] with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga, is that with them the deprivations and rigors are undergone for the payoff — for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life — or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Weil it was entirely the opposite. It was her wish, or her need, to undergo miserly affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest (p. 250).
I was thinking that I’d have a nice and neat conclusion to this post here. But it’s been sitting in my drafts folder for several days now, and I’ve not come with one. I realized this morning that the challenge I face is that I don’t know how to conclude the post. I had this idea that I could learn something from how Simone Weil lived and died, but I don’t know what that something is. It’s clear to me that I’m not willing to live the convictions she lived. In fact, my sympathies are with her parents. But I’m also haunted by the fact that I should be doing more to counter the actions of our government here in the United States.
Not a good conclusion to this post, I know. But it reflects the uncertainties in which I’m living.
