Since buying Waiting for God in the last month and indeed in the centenary year of Ms Weil’s birth, I have been fairly ensconsed with her philosophical writings which part of me rejects because of the strength of her writing. She continues to intrigue however, with her strong likeness to Meister Eckhart, to images in the poetry of Paul Celan , and to Marguerite Porete, the beguine who found her death during the French Inquisition. All the above named authors are searchable in Poethead with a special emphasis on Paul Celan whose work features so little here, save in two small pieces.
This then is the Google doc note:
[ A brief note on Simone Weil‘s Notebooks ].
I had published Necessity on the Poethead blog to acknowledge and celebrate International Women’s day, which as everyone knows occurs annually on March the Eight (annually).
I shall add in the link to that poem at the end of this note. I have taken to carrying round the Joan Dargan book “Thinking Poetically” because my time is carved into segments of day in which certain functions and duties must occur. These largely revolve around the children, thus the luxury of reading has evolved into a certain office time which I have claimed totally for myself, or indeed in moments of utter frustration books are packed into a bag with the hope of a coffee shop, a traffic jam or a warm park.
“Even to let the imagination linger over certain things as possible (which is completely different from clearly conceiving a possibility, a thing essential to virtue) is already to commit oneself. curiosity is the cause of this. To forbid (not from conceiving but from lingering over) certain thoughts; not to think about. People believe that thought does not commit one, but it alone does commit one, and the licence of thought imprisons all freedoms. Not to think about, supreme faculty. Purity, negative virtue.”
and….
“if what is supreme can be expressed in our language only by means of negation, in the same way, we can imitate it only by means of negation.”
Simone Weil, Thinking Poetically, ed, Joan Dargan State University of NY press. 1999.
I am adding in the links to the other small pieces re Weil at the end of this post, along with the hope that when I have thoroughly finished the two books on my desk that I shall go beyond aphorism and discuss the works more intimately. The above note includes her ideas on negation which are more completely expressed in her essays on Catholicism which are manifestly not written by a theist, indeed she was unbaptized at her death, though she seemed to possess a catholic consciousness and philosophy that owes a lot to Aquinas and indeed to the tradition of Isacc Luria (She was an agnostic Jew in her upbringing).
Wikipedia on Weil
The Centenary of Ms Weil’s Birth.
Necessity.
Once by Paul Celan.
Paul Celan and Heidegger, ‘translation at the mountain of death’
Chris Murray 