Gravity and Grace

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As I read Weil's essays in Waiting For God, I am getting more accessible and well-expounded ideas, but I still wonder—is this who we should all be reading? In June 1941 the Reverend Father Perrin, a Dominican friend then living at Marseilles, sent me a letter which I do not happen to have kept but which ran more or less as follows: ‘There is a young Jewish girl here, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left. A change in external working or living conditions will not necessarily alter who we are as human persons.

As it happens with most of the Philosophy books I’ve read I don’t agree with 100% Simone Weil says and sometimes it can get pretty dense for my liking, but she’s absolutely incredible and I respect her enormously.

However these were balanced with nuggets that I found to be entirely fresh and hopeful: "God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. As we have said, Weil spoke from her own personal experiences, and so she held that “experience proves that this waiting [to reach the moment of ‘grace’ or insight] is satisfied. Gravity and Grace’ is by no means an easy read, but it is a fascinating one that offers lots of little valuable thought-provoking insights. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. This insistence upon inner purity and authenticity made her pitiless for all the authors in whom she thought she could detect the slightest affectation, the slightest hint of insincerity or self-importance—Corneille, Hugo or Nietzsche for instance.

The effort of expression’, she wrote to me, ‘has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples. NOW that it’s in a New Edition - having been out of print for so long - new readers have No Excuse for not reading this masterpiece. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales on initiation.Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life(there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. Alla ting jag ser, hör, vidrör, andas, förtär; alla väsen jag möter – alla dem hindrar jag att få beröring med Gud, och jag hindrar Guds beröring med dem, i samma mån som någonting hos mig säger ’jag’”. we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'. After this experience she went back to Marseilles, where her parents, who had been driven from Paris by the invasion, were living provisionally.