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May 17, 2010, 01:47 PM
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Member Since: Jan 2009
Posts: 3,982
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Recently, I learned of this woman, Simone Weil. You may already know of her.
http://rivertext.com/weil3.html
From Wikepedia: "Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, as her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was André Weil, who would go on to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
She suffered throughout her life from severe headaches, sinusitis, and poor physical coordination, and spared no scrutiny to these in her philosophical writings. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range."[1]
[edit]Intellectual life
Weil was a precocious student, proficient in ancient Greek by the age of 12. She later learned Sanskrit after reading the Bhagavad Gita...
....she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a laborer in two factories..."
I really like the way she writes: "I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat."
She used to have these violent headaches and would recite the following poem and it allowed her to come out the other side of the headache. She was not religious an she spoke it out.
She writes: "I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines."
Love
Love bade me welcome: yet my 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, 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.
- George Herbert, 1593-1633
Anyway, I thought I'd share a bit about her as she does seem to be 'one that has gone before'. I wondered if she was dissociative, hmmm.
I liked the humility of this quote: "The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
– Simone Weil, (from the essay "Human Personality")
Hope for some inspiration here for you all here. I have found knowing of her life and reading about her rather comforting these past few weeks..
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