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Simone Weil-A Dissenting View Simone Weil had the kind of genius that marshals all fact, all history, all literature, all culture to one consuming interest. With her great learning, she strove to connect fragments of Pythagorean geometry, Jesus, Krishna, Plato, American Indian tales (the marriage of Dirty-Boy and the daughter of the chief becomes the Incarnation and the Redemption), Gilgamesh and Sanskrit, the Cather and Manichean heresies, Chinese Taoist writings and universal folklore. All of them, she said, led to "the truth." The poor chaplain of the Free French Forces who came to see her complained: "What confusion ... the acrobatics of a squirrel in a revolving cage! ... it would be a hundred times better to be a peasant with no more culture than a good country priest...." Her notebooks are filled with this ceaseless connecting. "Flight of Christ into Egypt. The hidden infancy of Dionysus, or Orestes...." "Non-Euclidean geometry. Parallel lines meet if one regards the infinite as finite. Orders of infinity. Cantor." In the mysterious poetry of impacted thought, connections leap up faster than words can catch them. Here is a passage that might fit into a page of Virginia Woolf's Journal: "Waves. Whole and parts-Same and Other-Horizon in midocean. We are encircled by our own vision. Pan, god of shepherds. Shepherds at Christmas. Vocation of labourers: the contemplation of things." We see her in our mind's eye-dressed in her dark, serviceable cape, her beret squashed down on her short black electric hair, her round, child-sized spectacles barely covering her large inquisitive eyes. She is hurrying off to teach her classes, or to demonstrate, or to talk in union-halls to the workers, or to sit through all-night sessions with her cotheorists of French radical politics of the twenties and thirties. She rushes breathlessly and awkwardly, sometimes impatiently and self-destructively. At the Spanish Front she rushed into a pan of boiling oil. Because of the dreadful injury she 19 20 A HOLOCAUST MENTALITY had to be removed for treatment, much to the relief, we gather, of comrades who worried about the zeal (despite her pacifism) with which she handled the gun she didn't know how to shoot. She was astonishing in her capacity to see how things connect and just as astonishing in her capacity for blindly not seeing-and no one could argue her out of either position. In all ways but one, the biography of Simone Weil by her longtime friend and fellow philosophy-student, Simone Petrement,':. confirms beliefs about Weil already held by readers-the brilliant mind, the passion for justice, the obsession with the Catholic Church, which she could neither embrace whole-heartedly nor leave alone. But the biography also suggests another area that stuns. Simone Weil was implacably anti-Semitic. Religious meditator that she was, she gave to her bigotry an elaborately theological basis. The question then arises that is at the heart of all morality. Is it possible to be regarded by history as brilliant, high-minded, puresouled ... and also be a bigot? Is bigotry only idiosyncrasy, like left- or right-handedness, for which we make allowances when encountering the otherwise noble mind? Or is it the worm that creeps into the soul and corrupts all doctrine? The appearance of a detailed biography makes it possible to ask the question in more specific form. Can Simone Weil, who was an anti-Semite, also be what almost everyone of the friends referred to in this biography calls her-a "saint"? Or is there in antiSemitism a willful ignorance that must corrode the anti-Semite's philosophy even while it maintains the anti-Semite comfortably in prejudice? Easy to prove, among the stupid, the resounding yes to this question. How is it possible in the case of Simone Weil? Her biographer, untroubled by the moral question, reverently prefaces with one of her own: "There are few men or women who would not feel unworthy to touch such a life. So the question must be asked: Who am I that I dare to speak out?" Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34, of self-starvation. Ostensibly this was done in sympathy with the deprived French workers, but whatever the real reason, certainly it was out of deep division "Simone Weil, a Life, Pantheon, 1978. Simone Weil-A Dissenting View 21 within her soul. Dare I jog her now on her bed of pain? I cannot do otherwise. Her frail and brilliant life...

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