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Simone Weil s Political Philosophy 6th Edition Benjamin
P. Davis Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Benjamin P. Davis
ISBN(s): 9781538171967, 1538171961
Edition: 6
File Details: PDF, 1.53 MB
Year: 2023
Language: english
Simone Weil’s Political
Philosophy
 Simone Weil’s
Political Philosophy
Field Notes from the Margins

Benjamin P. Davis

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Davis, Benjamin P., author.
Title: Simone Weil's political philosophy : field notes from the margins /
Benjamin P. Davis.
Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Davis demonstrates how
Simone Weil's Marxism challenges current neoliberal understandings of
the self and of human rights. Explaining her related critiques of
colonialism and of political parties, it presents Weil as a
twentieth-century political philosopher who anticipated and critically
responded to the most contemporary political theory"-- Provided by
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Subjects: LCSH: Weil, Simone, 1909-1943--Political and social views.
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Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
To Rebecca, Lucian, Scott, and Helen
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Author’s Note xi
Abbreviations xiii
Preface xv

Introduction: Simone Weil as a Political Philosopher 1

Chapter 1: Critique of Revolution 13
Chapter 2: Critique of Colonialism 35
Chapter 3: Critique of the (Neoliberal) Self 51
Chapter 4: Critique of Human Rights 69
Chapter 5: Construction of Belonging in an Uprooted World 89
Conclusion: From Theory to Practice 127

Bibliography 133
Index 141
About the Author 151

vii
 Acknowledgments

I have looked forward to the moment in which I could publicly thank those
who have shaped this book: Scott Ritner, for asking me in Boston to elabo-
rate on how I read Weil. Lissa McCullough, for such strikingly original and
illuminating readings of Weil. Caleb Faul, Gary Suchor, Carlie Hughes, and
Jaclyn Berg, for formative conversations, and for our efforts to challenge
a neoliberal university. Beatrice Marovich, for lending me so many books.
The librarians of Emory University and the University of Toronto, for get-
ting me Weil’s work in French. The security staff at Emory’s Woodruff
Library, especially C.J., for letting me into my study to read Weil before the
stacks were supposed to be open. My parents and brother, for lifelong sup-
port. Sophie Bourgault, for her reading of Weil as a figure of care, and for
living out that ethic. Andrew Tyler Johnson, for reading all my work. Eric
Aldieri, for an infinite conversation. Baruch Malewich, for pointing out ten-
sions in Weil’s critique of collectivity. Christy Wampole, for teaching me
about the essay. Valérie Loichot, for encouraging me to read Weil alongside
Glissant. Adam Sitze, for reading so well. Cindy Willett and John Lysaker,
for reading my manuscript-sized early reflections on Weil. John Stuhr, for
pluralistic disagreement. Tom Flynn, for asking me to write an encyclopedia
entry on Weil. Fannie Bialek, for asking me to read Weil with her, and for
showing me how to read better. Diane Enns, for returning me to Weil’s early
work. Penny Weiss, for conversation. Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, por todo.
Lauren Highsmith, for what you do, and for your music. Chelsea Jack, for
your thoughts. Rohini Patel, for conversation about Weil over wine. Mark
Kingwell, for mentorship. Vincent Lloyd, for mentorship. Lucy Benjamin,
for encouragement. Frieda Ekotto, for reminding me that we read Weil for
the depth of her thinking. Jessica Whyte, for compelling conversation. Gerard
Aching, for showing me how to live well. Gabby, for being who you are.
Lucian, for keeping your door open. Helen, for living a feminist life. Rebecca,
for teaching me to write.

ix
 Author’s Note

When reading commentary on a translation, it is my preference as a reader to

have citations of both the translation and the original in the body of the text.
As much as possible, in this book I provided references to both, listing the
English/French page numbers. That is the good news. The bad news is that
this book was written entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result,
I had limited access to academic libraries, so I relied on online sources more
than I would have otherwise. When I cited the original French versions of
Weil’s texts, I relied on the editions found in the French digital library of Les
Classiques des sciences sociales, which is associated with l’Université du
Québec à Chicoutimi. I cited the page numbers that can be found on the top
right corner of each digitalized page.

xi
 Abbreviations

APP On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Translated by Si-

mon Leys. New York: New York Review of Books, 2013.
CO La condition ouvrière. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951.
EHP Écrits historiques et politiques. Paris: Éditions Galli-
mard, 1960.
EL Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres. Paris: Éditions Gal-
limard, 1957.
EM Écrits de Marseille. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2008.
FW Formative Writings: 1929–1941. Translated by Dorothy
Tuck McFarland and Wilhelma Van Ness. Amherst: Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
GG Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Ma-
rio von der Ruhr. New York: Routledge, 2002; La Pesanteur
et la grâce. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1947.
LPW Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings. Translated by
Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
NR The Need for Roots. Translated by Arthur Wills. New York:
Routledge, 2002; L’enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration
des devoirs envers l’être humain. Paris: Éditions Galli-
mard, 1949.
OL Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur Wills and
John Petrie. New York: Routledge, 1958; Oppression et lib-
erté. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1955.
SE Selected Essays 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral
Writings. Translated by Richard Rees. Eugene: Wipf and
Stock, 2015.

xiii
xiv Abbreviations

SS Sur la science. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966.

SWA Simone Weil: An Anthology. New York: Penguin, 2005.
SWC Simone Weil on Colonialism. Translated and edited by J. P.
Little. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
WG Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York:
Routledge Revivals, 2009; Attente de Dieu. Paris: Éditions
Fayard, 1966.
 Preface

Simone Weil’s life and work continue to speak to me so strongly because

of how she tried to live ethically in her complicated and compromised time,
a time of capitalism and empire that remains our time, that reaches into the
present. It was not that she simply sought to be a “good person”—she knew
that by living comfortably in France, a colonizing country, she was too com-
plicit in state-based practices of domination to claim such a title for herself.
Instead of making such claims, she asked questions—of herself, of others,
and of the world. I remain compelled by her practice of inquiry that involves
not only reading as much as she could from a variety of traditions—she
would learn Sanskrit in order to appreciate with more nuance the Bhagavad
Gita—but also testing her insights in practice, reflecting on that practice in
writing that we might call her field notes, and essaying those ideas in prac-
tice again. Indeed, Weil’s sense of essaying was never limited to writing; it
was also about honoring the conversations she had before and after her pen
touched the page. She consistently tried to learn from those who had lived
the concepts. When she studied oppression, she placed herself amidst Parisian
factory workers. When she studied labor, she picked grapes in French vine-
yards. Through a class analysis, Weil’s actions could be understood as patron-
izing, being that she came from a wealthy family. But when we also consider
that she came from a Jewish family and lived in an anti-Semitic society, and
that she was a woman living in a patriarchal society, it is our clear-cut diag-
noses and categorizations of her life that become troubled. What we are left
with is a philosopher who grappled seriously, rigorously, and intelligently
with her responsibilities to others in a context of tremendous brutality. When
she is understood that way, Simone Weil becomes our teacher in the present.

Benjamin P. Davis
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
January 2022

xv
 Introduction
Simone Weil as a Political Philosopher

Simone Weil’s political philosophy attempted both to interpret and to change

the world. Throughout her life, she remained critical of the nation-state and
capitalism. “One cannot disregard the fact,” she wrote incisively in her 1933
essay “Prospects,” “that all the political currents which now affect the masses,
whether they style themselves fascist, socialist, or communist, tend towards
the same form of State capitalism” (OL 18/23). She also continually worked
to transform her native France into a more just country. That work included
organizing labor, teaching Sophocles, Plato, and Marx, living modestly, and
dressing, as one of her biographers puts it, in “the clothes of a ragtag soldier
or a poor monk,” in garments “always of the same monastic, masculine cut.”1
In this way, her political philosophy involved both theory and practice.
This book is about Simone Weil’s ideas. It is also about how she tested
those ideas in the world. It is about the questions she asked, how she asked
them, and whom she considered her audience. It is also about why she found
some questions helpful and others limiting, why she used some concepts and
discarded others, and how her method of testing ideas alongside workers and
immigrants led her to draw some conclusions and not others about politics.
In Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy, I bring to the fore Weil’s political
writings, which in the United States are studied less than her theological writ-
ings. In each chapter, respectively, I put Weil into conversation with feminist
philosophy, decolonial philosophy, aesthetic theory, human rights discourse,
and Marxism.

* * *‌‌

‌‌
Perhaps the largest barrier in the way of studying both Weil’s ideas and how
she tested them is how her life has already been described as interesting but
ultimately as crazy. In a letter to her parents dated July 18, 1943, one of the
last letters she wrote in her short life, she predicted this reception, expressing
concern that people would focus on her attributes instead of reading her work

1
2 Introduction

with patience, effort, and attention (EL 228–229). Of the ever-increasing

number of biographical sketches of Weil easily found on the internet, many
continue to play the role that biography has too often played regarding
women philosophers: to treat their lives at the expense of their ideas, or to
use their biography to invalidate their ideas. It was not so different in her own
time; many people spoke about her in terms that overlooked her contributions
as a political philosopher.
In the French context, several prominent writers described Weil in religious
terms. Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time,” André
Gide said she was “the patron saint of all outsiders,” and Georges Bataille
modeled a character—a sort of Christian revolutionary—after her in his
novel Blue of Noon. Among philosophers, Maurice Blanchot praised Weil’s
thinking as “worthy of attention and rich in truth,”2 and Emmanuel Levinas
said she “lived like a saint and bore the suffering of the world.”3 General
and President Charles de Gaulle simply called her “crazy.”4 Even her friends
and biographers, Dominican priest Joseph-Marie Perrin and philosopher
Gustave Thibon, used her habit of smoking as a point of contrast to say that
she eschewed the basic goods of everyday life: “Of all the things belonging
to material life, tobacco was the only one which she was almost certain to
accept.”5 Later, philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, writing about philosophy
in France as well as about Plato and Marx, arguably Weil’s two greatest influ-
ences, simply did not mention her in his 1964 lectures to first-year philosophy
students in Paris.6
Beyond the French context, readings of Weil vary widely. Some European
philosophers found great value in her work. Hannah Arendt noted that perhaps
only Weil treated the subject of labor “without prejudice and sentimentality.”7
Giorgio Agamben called her conscience “the most lucid of our times.”8 Writer
Flannery O’Connor described Weil as a person of “great courage” whose
life was both comic and terrible—in a word, “ridiculous.”9 Perhaps most
famously, writing in The New York Review of Books one year before Lyotard’s
lectures, Susan Sontag described Weil’s life as “absurd in its exaggerations
and degree of self-mutilation,” noting that it is a life to regard “from a dis-
tance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence.”10 Sontag continued:
“We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for
the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice
themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their ‘views.’”
In my attempt to focus on what Sontag describes as Weil’s rarely con-
sidered “views,” I aim to avoid two tendencies in writing about Weil that
philosophers commenting on her work often fall back on. The first tendency
is to portray her as a genius. For instance, Martin Andic comments on Henry
Leroy Finch’s writings on Weil: “[Finch] was convinced that Simone Weil is
the genius we need to show us how to rethink religion, politics, history, and
 Introduction 3

culture.”11 In my view, to argue that a single philosopher can guide contem-

porary society in seemingly all spheres of life overstates the importance of
one thinker.
The second tendency is to stress the unity of Weil’s work across space and
time. For instance, Robert Chenavier argues that Weil’s writings contain “an
interior need for coherence, even if her work did not take the form of a sys-
tem.”12 He goes on to extend this claim to other aspects of Weil’s life: “To an
exceptional degree, the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment,
and her reflection form one single whole.”13 While Weil’s ability to connect
her theoretical reflections to her political commitments is certainly inspiring,
the tendency to view her work in terms of unity and wholeness, like the ten-
dency to portray her as a genius, can have the effect of suggesting that she is
a saint above basic human insight and contradiction. It is not necessarily the
case that a few comments on Weil’s coherence means that the commentator
thinks she is a saint. But it is the case that such comments lend themselves
to being read that way, leading some readers and students of Weil’s work to
underemphasize the internal tensions of her thought. To give just one example
of these tensions, Weil begins The Need for Roots by juxtaposing contrary
needs of the soul, maintains at once a critical and a constructive approach to
political collectives throughout the book, and writes that text at the same time
as she makes opposing arguments in On the Abolition of All Political Parties.
In other words, her thought forms not a single whole but multiple parts.
Countering both of the above tendencies, in her 1988 Between the Human
and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil, political theorist
Mary Dietz locates in Weil’s life and thought “a perpetual struggle” between
“attachment and withdrawal, worldliness and worldlessness, the human and
the divine.”14 Reading ambiguity into Weil’s work, Dietz argues that Weil’s
later writings that suggest a withdrawal from the world are simply “the other
side of her deep involvement in it.”15 Along similar lines, philosopher of
religion Lissa McCullough explains that there are, in fact, two movements
in Weil’s religious philosophy, a dialectic constituted by (1) a transcendence
of the finite through detachment and (2) a return to the finite through com-
passion.16 Cultural theorist Deborah Nelson further observes that expecting
Weil’s writings to show excessive spiritual sentiment leads to the takeaway
that Weil is another woman writer who is “psychologically cold rather than
engaged in an ethical project with different assumptions.”17 Where Dietz,
McCullough, and Nelson overlap is in their guiding effort to think about Weil
in terms, to use political theorist Sophie Bourgault’s phrase, “beyond the saint
and the red virgin.”18 To see Weil as actively working between withdrawal
from the world and engagement in it implies the need to read not only her
theological writings but also her political writings. Dietz explicitly argues
that “to understand Weil fully we need to attend not only to those writings
4 Introduction

that have already made her famous—her theological and mystical tracts, but
also to those political writings that capture the ‘other side’ of her intellectual
and practical life.”19 Only through this dual reading, Dietz concludes, can we
understand what Weil offers contemporary political discourse.
In addition to returning to Dietz’s book, today’s students of Weil benefit
from more recent books that explain and comment on Weil as a philosopher,
including A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone’s Simone Weil and
Theology and Lissa McCullough’s The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil:
An Introduction. Further, Yoon Sook Cha illuminatingly connects Weil’s
theological orientation to practical ethics in Decreation and the Ethical Bind:
Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other, Lewis Gordon links Weil’s concept
of decreation to political responsibility in Fear of Black Consciousness,
and Vincent Lloyd, in The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political
Theology, reads Weil as making important contributions to political life.20
“Weil seems to fit very easily into perversion as a diagnostic category,” Lloyd
helpfully warns.21 If I follow his warning in this book, I depart from his claim
that turning to her political writings is “counterproductive” because “Weil’s
political writings are political rhetoric, not political philosophy.”22 Lloyd’s
claim is indicative of a larger trend. Indeed, since Dietz’s 1988 Between the
Human and the Divine, readers in English are left with few options for study-
ing how Weil’s political philosophy contributes to new debates. If we follow
Dietz’s claim that to understand Weil’s contributions for the present, we need
to read her theological writings with her political writings, then readers of the
aforementioned books would benefit from a text that focuses anew on Weil’s
“other side.” In writing Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy, I have aimed to
provide that book.

* * *‌‌

‌‌
Taking as my focus how her analysis of collective life (i.e. political life)
shifted over time, in this book, I show how Weil’s political philosophy con-
tributes to ongoing political dilemmas. Each chapter examines a different
stage of her lifelong critical relationship to what she calls “collectivity.” By
“collectivity,” she means a basic group of social life such as a political party,
church, trade union, government bureaucracy, or social movement. At pres-
ent, many political actors are raising questions about the relationship they
should cultivate with respect to the collectivities to which they belong. For
instance, feminist philosophers debate the merits of the vocabulary of “resil-
ience” or “resistance” in regard to political movements; like Weil in her 1934
essay “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression,”
they are interrogating the political vocabulary of their time. Similarly, when
authors who have written for Jacobin worry about its affiliation with the
 Introduction 5

Democratic Party and start to write for the Marxist magazine Left Voice, they
are calling into question any comfortable relationship with reformist political
parties, as Weil did in her 1943 essay On the Abolition of All Political Parties.
And when residents of Minneapolis consider how to rebuild their city follow-
ing the occupation of the National Guard, they are raising questions about the
relationship citizens should cultivate amongst one another post-occupation,
as did Weil in her final book, The Need for Roots.
Weil observed that modern collectivities suffer from a lack of thinking.
Surrounded by and forced to work within mechanical operations in industrial
society, citizens themselves start to approximate machines instead of think-
ing for themselves. The political problem with this kind of unthinking is that
it “tends pretty well everywhere toward a form of totalitarian organization”
(OL 109/108). In other words, Weil specifies, unthinking members of a col-
lective form the backbone of “a system in which the State power comes to
exercise sovereign sway in all spheres, even, indeed above all, in that of
thought [surtout dans le domaine de la pensée]” (OL 109/108). Weil would
test these claims alongside other workers at a factory making electrical equip-
ment for trams and railways. This historical detail provides a contrast with
the often-painted image of Weil as the great figure of withdrawal from the
world, epitomized in the subtitle to a 2022 New York Review of Books essay,
which read “Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond
her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held in more or less steady
contempt.”23 What literary theorist Lyndsey Stonebridge observes in writing
about Weil and human rights serves as a guiding claim throughout this book:
“Weil wanted to get as far into her world as possible.”24
The overarching contention of this book is that that Weil’s critical relation-
ship to collectivity and unyielding criticism of social life in her oppressive
context stems not from genius, saintliness, or illness but from the fact that she
was a philosopher. With Socrates principally in mind, historian of philosophy
Pierre Hadot writes that the figure of the philosopher in ancient Greece was
atopos, meaning “out of place.”25 With Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche in mind,
and assessing the past and future of Critical Theory, philosopher Nikolas
Kompridis writes that being a philosopher means “being out of step with, in
contradiction to, one’s time, forced to oppose it, and to act as its ‘bad con-
science.’”26 In the history of Western philosophy, both ancient and modern,
then, philosophical life has involved a critique of the world as it is. For that
reason, we do not necessarily need any hyperbolic or psychoanalytic expla-
nations for Weil’s interrogations of the self, the social, and the world. The
answer might lie simply in the fact that she was a philosopher.
6 Introduction

Further, Weil fits into the definitions prominent philosophers have used to
think about political philosophy. For instance, philosopher James Tully has
defined political philosophy as

a critical attitude [that] starts from the present struggles and problems of politics
and seeks to clarify and transform the normal understanding of them so as to
open up the field of possible ways of thinking and acting freely in response . . .
By studying the unanticipated blockages, difficulties, and new problems that
arise in the cycle of practices of freedom—of negotiations, implementations,
and review—political philosophers can detect the limitations and faults of their
initial account, make improvements, and exercise again, on the basis of the new
problems, this permanent critical ethos of testing the practices by which we are
governed.27

Tully has in mind Michel Foucault in particular, but we could very well think
of Weil as exemplary of his definition. Keeping in mind Hadot’s reading
of the philosopher as atopos, I see Weil as a philosopher; keeping in mind
Tully’s definition of political philosophy as a “critical attitude,” I read Weil
as a political philosopher.
Some will immediately dismiss my claim—Weil as a political philoso-
pher—as a misreading of a thinker who wanted so clearly to excise certain
elements of herself, who had little tolerance for ambiguity and instead sought
purity. When I look at the footnotes backing up those claims in the scholarly
literature, or when I ask scholars at conferences how they arrived at the
conclusion that Weil was mentally ill, they tend to cite her notebooks, letters
to friends, or the “terrible prayer,” which she wrote in her New York note-
books.28 They also tend not to engage Weil’s early writings on politics. While
I do not want to police the boundaries of philosophy proper—and certainly
notebook entries can be philosophical—I have come to wonder how fair it is
to make sweeping and indeed damning conclusions about a person and a life
based on their most personal, tentative writings. I maintain that, whereas a
published article is a place to demonstrate a clear voice, a journal or notebook
is a place of immense vulnerability. It is a place where we explore our own
depths.29 Reading Weil as a fellow traveler, as human all too human like the
rest of us, we can start to consider her contradictory claims less as part of an
epic battle between gravity and grace and more as reflective of a person with
the courage to consider—and often hold together in what the poet John Keats
called “negative capability”—the tremendous anxieties and contradictions
that face any person who tarries with the questions that emerge from a robust
confrontation with modern political life.30 Blanchot puts it this way: “I do not
see why Simone Weil alone would be disqualified as a thinker because she
accepted within herself as legitimate the inevitable opposition of thoughts.”31
 Introduction 7

What we gain from reading Weil as a fellow traveler—if, admittedly, an

idiosyncratic one—is both an ability to criticize her limitations honestly and
an opening to learn from her dynamic use of concepts, claims, and questions.
My approach is thus different from tendencies to read Weil either as offer-
ing a path holier than the one on which her reader is currently walking or
as pathological. In regard to the tendency to say she offers a holy path, my
view is that to suggest that Weil’s life is absurd or anomalous, to the extent
that our lives could never approximate her own, has the effect of preventing
us from dwelling with the possibility that the absurd actions Weil performed
in fact follow from her understanding of the injustices she was implicated in
given that she was living in a capitalist empire. Thought this way, her absurd
actions become re-understood as radical ones. In regard to the tendency to
pathologize, I wonder whether scholars trained in the humanities are qualified
to make such diagnostic claims. Further, it says something about our society
when we pathologize someone who, on their own terms, was seeking justice.
For these reasons, when I reference Weil’s biography in this book, I do so to
argue that Weil consistently listened to parts of French society that were in the
process of transformation: she sought out the gaps and fragments in collec-
tive life that called forth a new future, one of fair labor (not yet in the factory,
but seen in fleeting moments) and international solidarity (not yet the order
of Europe, but seen in the Spanish Civil War). I argue that Weil practiced a
“true” philosophy not because she got the world correct—that is, that she
made claims that could be empirically verified like the color of a wall—but
because she tried to think in and through the world.32

* * *‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌

‌‌
Commenting on Weil’s well-known line on friendship in a letter to her
friend—“Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friend-
ship, since those of us who do not love each other are not separated”—writer
Rebecca Solnit notes that “when that friend arrives on the doorstep, some-
thing remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them
your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that
which cannot be possessed. The far seeps even to the nearest. After all we
hardly know our own depths.”33 With Stonebridge, I have already noted that
in this book I present Weil as a thinker in and of her world (as a corrective
to reading her as a near totally detached mystic seeking withdrawal). With
Bourgault, I have started to suggest that Weil is a complex thinker of politics,
including relationships of care (as a corrective to reading her as a saint or to
focus on her sexuality). With Solnit, I aim to return to Weil some of her own
depths. The Weil I have in mind is, as singer Patti Smith puts it in reading
Weil, “an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets.”34
8 Introduction

Perhaps even sympathetic readers will argue that I have gone too far in
my generous reading, or misreading, of Weil—Weil more as a multitudinous
thinker of plurality, as a political philosopher who cultivated a negative capa-
bility and a deep engagement with others and the world, and less as a mad
woman, saint, or genius who sought primarily to transcend what ties her to
the world here and now. Cross-dressing and spending all her time among the
poor, they will say—of course she was crazy! My response is twofold. First,
my aim is not so much to read Weil “correctly,” in a diagnostic sense, as it is
to suggest new angles through which we can study her contributions to theory
and practice. Second, and to reiterate, one of the strengths of Western philoso-
phy is that the tradition is sufficiently varied to include under the heading of
“philosopher” someone condemned and abjected for her original views, for
literally standing with the oppressed, for cross-dressing, and so on. As part of
a thought experiment or an exercise in thinking, I want to ask again: What if
she was not mentally ill? What if she was a philosopher living out her com-
mitments to justice?

Chapter Outline
In chapter 1 I argue that Weil’s method is the essay, not just as a form of writ-
ing but as a mode of testing (or “essaying”) her ideas against the material con-
ditions of the world. I first read her 1934 essay “Reflections Concerning the
Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression.” I then read her “Factory Journal”
(1934–1935), which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections”
by placing herself in French factories. I conclude by stating the fruits of
Weil’s method for political philosophy today: an interrogation of present
political keywords (“resistance” and “resilience”) and a practice of philoso-
phy as a way of life. In the late 1930s, Weil would turn her critical faculties
toward another form of oppression: colonialism.
Chapter 2 focuses on Weil’s critique of colonialism. While Weil had felt
ashamed of France since 1930, when she read an exposé of the Yen Bay
massacre in the Petit Parisien, she did not focus on colonialism until around
1937. This chapter examines Weil’s late-1930s essays on colonialism, placing
them in conversation with contemporary postcolonial and decolonial theory.
I first present philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of the “frame” to suggest
that Weil elucidates “the colonial frame”—the way the ideology of colonial-
ism conditions its subjects to see themselves, others, and the world in such
a manner that colonial violence is normalized, legitimized, and maintained.
Second, I argue that Weil reveals the colonial frame in interwar France
by performing a “critical phenomenology” of colonizing society, bringing
our attention to the particular, material, and everyday situations in which
the ideology of colonialism manifests itself, such as instances of grieving.
 Introduction 9

The chapter concludes by offering cautionary notes against three potential

responses to the colonial frame—inclusion, pity, and tolerance—and by con-
tending that the political value of Weil’s anti-colonialism lies in its emphasis
on self-critique. But any claim to self-critique raises another question: How
is “the self” understood?
In chapter 3, I read Weil’s 1941—but published in 1944—essay “Literature
and Morals” as well as her 1941—but published in 1951—essay “The
Responsibilities of Literature.” I take her call at the end of “The Responsibilities
of Literature” for silent spiritual reflection as a jumping-off point to place her
in dialogue with the artist Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionism. While Weil
might not have considered Rothko’s paintings to be works of “genius” that
could reorient the polis, I argue that the spirit of contemplation Rothko invites
resonates with Weil’s critique of advertising in “Literature and Morals.” What
Weil and Rothko offer, when taken together, is an alternative to the facile neo-
liberal call to reject dark nights of the soul for the sake of self-development,
a call that remains obsessed with resilience that overcomes social barriers. I
argue that Weil’s contribution to contemporary debates on neoliberalism is
found in her portrait of a self that tarries with the existential difficulties of
finitude, pain, and solitude. At this point in the book, the reader might ask:
Does Weil make any contributions to critiques of neoliberalism today beyond
her understanding of the self? In the next chapter, I argue that she does as
she turned her critical attention once again, this time toward the rising tide of
rights discourse.
In chapter 4, I read Weil’s 1942/1943 essay known most widely in English
as “Human Personality” (La Personne et le sacré), outlining her critique of
human rights and demonstrating how her critique prefigures many contem-
porary responses to the neoliberal turn in human rights. In doing so, I place
her critiques of Personalism and of human rights discourse in dialogue with
historian Samuel Moyn and philosopher Jessica Whyte, both of whom inter-
rogate today’s rights discourse that is comfortably entwined with neoliberal
capitalism. Following political scientist Helen Kinsella’s claim that Weil
understands rights as a kind of political “illusion,” I ultimately argue that
what Weil’s critique misses, in its thoroughgoing condemnation of rights, is
what Hannah Arendt refuses to relinquish, namely, the perplexities of human
rights.35 For Weil’s critique of human rights to be most productive, I con-
clude, it needs to maintain an opening for how rights claims can be deployed
strategically even in our creaturely, decidedly imperfect, neoliberal moment.
Given her critique of the language of rights, we might still wonder: For Weil,
through what language should we make political demands?
In chapter 5, I suggest a continuity between Weil’s early (and more obvi-
ous) Marxism and her later work. This chapter recognizes that Weil’s criti-
cal impulse takes a different form in the final year of her life. In addition to
10 Introduction

offering critiques (of progress, of greatness, and of so-called civilization), she

also sought to construct a new way of life for France as part of its rebuilding
after the war. Considering her proposal for this collective reconstruction is
especially important following the uprisings of 2020, which faced—and, at
the time of writing this book, in many places still face—a militarized, coun-
terrevolutionary response. In other words, the question of how to rebuild our
communities—in all their political richness and spiritual depth—remains very
much on many of our minds as police and military forces continue to occupy
our cities. To conclude the chapter, I place Weil in dialogue with contempo-
rary Marxists Jodi Dean and Adolph Reed Jr., thus situating her in a Marxist
tradition wary of identity-based claims and in search of a wider movement.
This book will be successful if it achieves two results: if on a narrow or
scholarly level, Weil scholars of my generation take up the book’s invitation
to engage more robustly with Weil’s political writings from the 1930s; and
if on a wider or cultural level, the book continues a conversation about what
it means to live a life of ethical and political commitment when one is born
into capitalism and empire.

NOTES

1. Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil (New York: Penguin, 2001), 19.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Affirmation (desire, affliction),” in The Infinite Conversa-
tion, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 106.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, “Simone Weil against the Bible,” in Difficult Freedom:
Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990), 133.
4. Quoted in Robert Zaretsky, “What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical
Reminder” in New York Times, February 20, 2018, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/02​
/20​/opinion​/simone​-weil​-human​-rights​-obligations​.html.
5. J. M. Perrin and Gustave Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, trans. Emma
Craufurd (New York: Routledge, 1953), 120.
6. See Jean-François Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, trans. Andrew Brown (Cam-
bridge, MA: Polity, 2013).
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2018), 131, n. 83.
8. See Giorgio Agamben, “Preface,” in Simone Weil, La personne et le sacré
(Paris: Rivages, 2017). Translation mine.
9. See Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2003), 272, 508.
10. Susan Sontag, “Simone Weil,” New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963,
https:​//​www​.nybooks​.com​/articles​/1963​/02​/01​/simone​-weil​/.
 Introduction 11

11. Martin Andic, “Introduction,” in Henry Leroy Finch, Simone Weil and the Intel-
lect of Grace (New York: Continuum, 2001), 1.
12. Robert Chenavier, Simone Weil: Attention to the Real, trans. Bernard E. Doer-
ing (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 1.
13. Ibid., 5. It is worth noting that Chenavier’s Simone Weil. Une philosophie du
travail treats the tensions in Weil’s thought. Perhaps my examples of portraits of Weil
move too quickly in this introduction. My intention is to point out tendencies and
implications of those portraits, not, of course, to condemn the important and long-
standing work of commentators on Weil.
14. Mary Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of
Simone Weil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), xiv.
15. Ibid.
16. Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 11.
17. Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag,
Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9.
18. Sophie Bourgault, “Beyond the Saint and the Red Virgin: Simone Weil as Femi-
nist Theorist of Care,” Frontiers 35, no. 2 (2014): 1–27.
19. Dietz, Between, xiv.
20. See Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2022), 65, 223.
21. Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 137.
22. Ibid.
23. Jacqueline Rose, “An Endless Seeing,” New York Review of Books, January
13, 2022.
24. Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 96.
25. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to
Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 56–58.
26. Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and
Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 5.
27. James Tully, “Political Theory as a Critical Activity,” Political Theory 30, no.
4 (2002): 551.
28. For a commentary on Weil’s terrible prayer, as well as for an illuminating dis-
cussion of an ethical theory in Weil, see Yoon Sook Cha, Decreation and the Ethical
Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other (New York: Fordham University Press,
2017), 8, 15.
29. But here I contradict myself, because in my first chapter I will rely on her “Fac-
tory Journal,” itself a kind of notebook, and one certainly not meant for publication
in the way some of her other essays were. While I do not judge Weil’s mental health
based on my reading of this journal, I do draw some philosophical and conceptual
conclusions from it. Is that to say I think there is a substantial distinction between her
factory journal and her notebooks? Certainly not. I simply felt that I needed to engage
it in order to see how she reflected on her practical test of her 1930s theoretical
12 Introduction

writings on labor, solidarity, and the possibility of revolution. Perhaps other scholars
have felt a similar need to engage her notebooks.
30. Keats himself came up with this phrase in a letter to his brothers. He defined
negative capability in striking, if gendered, terms as “when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
For this quotation as well as extensive commentary on the phrase, see Brian Rejack
and Michael Theune, eds., Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), xviii–xix.
31. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 106.
32. For this sense of a “true” philosophy, see Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, 106.
33. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Penguin, 2005), 29.
For a translation of Weil’s letter to Thibon, see Simone Weil as We Knew Her, 124.
34. Patti Smith, Devotion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 9.
35. See Helen M. Kinsella, “Of Colonialism and Corpses: Simone Weil on Force,”
in Women’s International Thought: A New History, eds. Patricia Owens and Katharina
Rietzler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 72–92.
 Chapter 1

Critique of Revolution

In this chapter, I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the

way that she reads Marx—as forming “not a doctrine but a method of under-
standing and action” (OL 44/47). My view is that Weil’s method is likewise
twofold: she attempts to understand the world through inquiry, and then she
tests her understanding through action. First, I read “Reflections Concerning
the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). In that essay, inquiry,
exemplified by Weil’s calling into question the term “revolution,” is her way
of understanding reality around her, including forces of oppression and pos-
sibilities for liberation. Second, I read her “Factory Journal” (1934–1935),
which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections” by placing
herself in French factories. I conclude by stating the fruits of Weil’s method
for political philosophy today: an interrogation of political keywords (e.g.,
resistance, resilience) and a practice of philosophy as a way of life.1
From her early writings onward, Weil concerned herself with questions
of philosophical method. Her dissertation, “Science and Perception in
Descartes,” criticizes modern science for its elevation of abstraction over and
against perception and intuition. She needed to read across Descartes’s oeu-
vre in order to present her contrarian point, namely, that Descartes endorsed
ordinary perception as a function of understanding. This epistemological
reading of Descartes carried political implications. In effect, Weil claims,
the hierarchy of abstraction over perception maintains science as the pre-
rogative of elites, because, on this account, “reasoning in common people is
closely tied to intuition” but not to knowledge per se (FW 34/SS 12). In her
study of Descartes, Weil concludes that there is “a common wisdom” that is
“much closer to authentic philosophy than is the kind of thinking that study
produces”; indeed, “[p]erception itself . . . is of the same nature as science,”
itself a mode of reasoning (FW 53/SS 32, 33).
Weil’s reading of Descartes thus rescues from modern science quotidian
practices as modes of knowledge production.2 Ordinary, daily work—such as
baking bread or planting trees—provides a point of entry for knowledge. Her
13
14 Chapter 1

reading also offers a more authentic scientia, a wisdom not of abstraction but
of orientation or direction. For her, science “is not at all a matter of thinking
conveniently but of thinking well, that is, by directing one’s thought prop-
erly” (FW 45/SS 23). Proper direction is toward causes. She quotes Descartes
to make her point: “Analysis shows the real way a thing was methodically
discovered, and shows how effects depend on causes”; this analysis is differ-
ent from synthesis, which “does not teach the method by which the thing was
discovered” (FW 45, 46/SS 24). More than just solving a problem, analysis
involves understanding how something became problematic in the first
place. A focus on causes and not effects was a key insight Weil learned from
Descartes. Thinking rigorously involves analysis that starts from causes. Weil
would hold on to this methodological principle in her early political writings.

A POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

Original and heterodox in her own analysis, Weil was constantly frustrated by
the conventional political theory of her day, which posed “political and juridi-
cal transformation” as capable of abolishing capitalist oppression (OL 40/43).
For her, this political theory was limited in that it began from effects. Reading
Marx through Descartes in response, Weil claims that to begin from the actual
causes means starting from “the very foundations of our social life,” namely,
the specific division of labor that resulted from the separation of manual and
intellectual labor (OL 40/43). This separation is the foundation of modern
culture, “a culture of specialists” (OL 40/44). In turn, she calls not merely for
a shift in intellectual training, but for a redefinition of what counts as science
and as a valuable knowledge practice. “Science is a monopoly,” she writes,
“not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-
scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say that
they can only believe, not assimilate” (OL 40/44). A factory worker pulls a
lever; he gets results without method, without necessarily understanding how
the machine works. “And the same applies,” Weil continues, “on the political
plane” (OL 40/44). State bureaucracy, military, and police, in their functional
separation from the population, echo the distinction found in the factory:
“the managerial and executive functions” remain separate (OL 41/44). But
Weil locates the cause of oppression differently from Marx. On her analysis,
capitalist society does not carry within it the conditions for “real democracy”;
rather, “the establishment of such a régime presupposes a preliminary trans-
formation in the realm of production and that of culture” (OL 41/44). And that
of culture. That is, without the abolition of the specialist culture—the “radical
distinction” between managers and executors, knowers and doers—so-called
 Critique of Revolution 15

revolution would only perpetuate oppression (OL 41/44). It would be a

change only in ownership of production. It would, that is, be a change of
the consequences and not of the causes. This was Weil’s insight. This is why
analysis is key. At stake in method is liberty itself.
In what follows, I read Weil’s method as I think she herself did: not as
a professional approach to texts but as a way of engaging the world. This
reading recalls the Greek root of method, ὁδός, meaning “way.” What Weil’s
method ultimately gives us is a kind of hodos biou, a way of life. Reading
what she called her first “magnum opus,”3 the 1934 “Reflections Concerning
the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression,” I argue that Weil’s philosophi-
cal method consists in understanding the world through inquiry, a mode of
questioning. But Weil never rested content with asking questions. She also
strove to essay her ideas in the world as well as on the page. To account for
her turn to practice, I then read her “Factory Journal” to present her way of
testing her theories articulated in “Reflections.” My conclusion will suggest a
few ways that we can learn from Weil’s method today—next steps on the path
she outlines. Indeed, her critique of revolution resonates for political actors
calling into question the political keywords of our own time.

UNDERSTANDING: INQUIRY AND TERMINOLOGY

“The present period is one of those when everything that seems normally to
constitute a reason for living dwindles away, when one must on pain of sink-
ing into confusion or apathy [le désarroi ou l’inconscience], call everything
into question again” (OL 36/40). So Simone Weil begins her 1934 essay
“Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression.” And
so does the present seem, to a number of us, to be a time of despair, confusion,
and pessimism. Weil responds with the suggestion of inquiry, the art both of
asking precise questions and of calling into question the forces at play and
the powers that be in one’s present. Thus, she follows two of her early and
lasting influences—Socrates in his formations of questions and Descartes
in his radical doubt. That precise inquiry promises a clarity of analysis such
that one avoids “sinking into confusion” is itself clear. But Weil suggests that
questioning does more than avoid confusion. It is also a way to avoid sinking
into l’inconscience—not so much apathy as thoughtlessness or unthinking.
By linking thoughts to potential actions, questioning is how one moves from
sinking to swimming strongly, even if against the current.
What a general strike is to the workers’ strike of a specific factory, Weil’s
inquiry is to raising questions about a single sphere of life under capitalism
and the State.4 To return to the opening line of “Reflections”: when everything
falls to pieces [tout . . . s’évanouit], everything must be called into question
16 Chapter 1

[l’on doit . . . tout remettre en question]. This is why, after a second sentence
on the spread of authoritarianism and nationalism as well as the depth of
these evils, she poses to herself the question of whether or not there exists a
sphere of life not “poisoned” by present conditions (OL 36/40). She details
the spheres—work, political leadership, technics, science, art, and family—to
conclude that, alas, no such nontoxic sphere exists. Hence the present is over-
all not hopeful but angoissant—anguished, anxious, distressed.
The second aspect that forms Weil’s inquiry, the art of calling into question,
often takes as its focus something more specific than production or spheres
of life, namely, the words themselves used to describe such phenomena.
Weil’s method includes a precise focus on how words are defined, employed,
and consequential—what she would later call “the power of words” (cf.
SWA 238–58). We might refer to this focus as Weil’s concern for terminol-
ogy. Having understood her point that the anxious present is poisoned in all
spheres of life, we expect Weil to provide a kind of antidote. “However,” she
begins her second paragraph disjunctively, “ever since 1789, there has been
one magic word which contains within itself all imaginable futures, and is
never so full of hope as in desperate situations—that word is revolution” (OL
37/41). “Revolution” is a “magic word” because it lacks material ground-
ing; it invokes the impossible without a relation to what is (physically and
politically) feasible. “Revolution,” as “the sudden reversal of the relationship
between forces,” she writes, defining the term as part of inquiring into it, “is
not only a phenomenon unknown in history, but furthermore, if we examine
it closely, something literally inconceivable, for it would be a victory of
weakness over force, the equivalent of a balance whose lighter scale were
to go down” (OL 74/75). In arguing this way, Weil disappoints, observing
clearly that what the Left in her time took as an antidote was in fact a placebo.
“Revolution” is a word in which one places one’s hopes, but which lacks
“anything rigorous” and, moreover, “is conjured up for demagogic purposes
by apprentice dictators” (OL 38/42). Hence Weil calls the term into question.
Questioning is the “first duty” that “the present period imposes on us” (OL
38/42). That is, the present conditions press on us—and here Weil shifts from
one’s asking oneself to a “we,” some collective or public—“to ask ourselves
if the term ‘revolution’ is anything else but a name, if it has any precise con-
tent, if it is not simply one of the lies produced by the capitalist system in
its rise to power which the present crisis is doing us the service of dissipat-
ing” (OL 38/42). This is a difficult question to ask, she acknowledges, for
many have sacrificed their lives for this word. But this difficulty also signals
importance. If the word is empty or if it is, indeed, promulgated as necessary
friction for the capitalist ascent to power—ultimately cut through as eas-
ily as a commercial or military jet uses the wind against it in order to take
 Critique of Revolution 17

flight—then “revolution” is a term with much at stake, deserving theoretical

consideration and critique.
Again Weil answers her own question. The painful truth is that “revolu-
tion” is an empty term—“a word for which you kill, for which you die, for
which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not pos-
sess any content” (OL 53/56). She does not, however, simply abandon the
term. The problem of content is part of a problem of definition: the contesta-
tions around “revolution” as a term “can only be smoothed over by the most
ambiguous formula”; and in addition to its lack of clarity, many invoke it,
but “there are perhaps not two who attach the same content to the term” (OL
53/56). Again prefiguring her later claims about the power of words, these
lines suggest terminological clarification and consistency as a way of sav-
ing lives. “Revolution,” a word with immense social traction in her day and
especially in her Marxian milieu, need not be given up, she concludes. But it
must be explained with a shared or communal content if it is to carry promis-
ing political meaning.
“[P]erhaps one can give a meaning [un sens] to the revolutionary ideal, if
not as a possible prospect in view, at any rate as a theoretical limit of fea-
sible social transformations [limite théorique des transformations sociales
réalisables]” (OL 53/56). With the invocation of réalisable, Weil is working
between possibility and impossibility. We cannot, at present, see ahead to a
coming revolution. And there are no guarantees. In this context, Weil focuses
on an ideal as a maximum of what can be achieved, that is, what can be
rendered possible or real. Here she is also making a point more specific than
condemning oppressed people for dreaming of liberty. In fact, she describes
such dreams both as an anthropological given—the fact that the human is a
“thinking creature” means that each dreams of liberty—and as a part of the
“permanent revolt” of the oppressed (OL 79, 66/80, 68). Her more specific
point is that a dream is not a method. When dreaming of liberty is taken as a
method, it serves as “an opium” (OL 79/80). In this way, dreaming can both
motivate and prevent realizing liberty. For her, the first actual step toward
liberty is conceptualizing it.
Weil presents conceptualizing liberty as idealizing it. “One can only steer
towards an ideal. The ideal is just as unattainable [irréalisable] as the dream,
but differs from the dream in that in concerns reality” (OL 79–80/80). She
continues by adding to feasibility both calculation and hierarchy, such that
the ideal “enables one, as a mathematical limit, to grade situations, whether
real or realizable [ou réelles ou réalisables], in an order of value from least
to greatest” (OL 80/80–81). Whether real or realizable, meaning that the
ideal serves as a standard against which to judge not only what is occurring
at present but also what could be made possible, that is, what can be realized.
Importantly, what is left out of her application of the ideal is the unrealizable
18 Chapter 1

or impossible. To contemporary ears this exclusion might sound strange.

Perhaps, one thinks, it makes sense to use an ideal to compare equally unreal-
izable or unfeasible alternatives (“dreams,” in Weil’s language), such as when
theorists at academic conferences, with no apparent connection to organizing
on the Left, read Marx for “openings” onto a liberty “to come.” This is not
how Weil reads Marx. Any lack of connection to concrete actions is a practice
she condemns as “developed passivity, neglect, the habit of expecting every-
thing from the outside, the belief in miracles” (OL 110/109). I will return to
this point in this book’s conclusion.
She allows for a more instrumental role for the ideal, invested not in a
future to come but in what is realizable in present situations through praxis.
The ideal she employs corrects the modern misdefinition of liberty: her claim
is that true liberty is a unity not of desire and satisfaction but of thought and
action (OL 81/82). Using this definition of liberty to judge societies, she sees
clearly that modern industrial society is unfree, because it relies on increasing
specialization through which a knowledgeable managerial class is separated
from a functional working class. Indeed, modern civilization is completely
unbalanced: humans become little more than cogs as the State takes a cen-
tral role in economic and social life, subordinating citizens’ interests to its
military expansion. A further irony and reversal: in modern life, collectivities,
such as political parties and trade unions, crush individuality by reproducing
what they claim to abolish. Both bureaucracy in politics and mechanization
in industry further separate thought and action. To read Weil’s ideal as a tool
for evaluation is to say that she is concerned with axiology—philosophical
inquiry pertaining to value (ethics and aesthetics).
We can see how Weil’s discussion of a toxic modern culture and, in
response, her sketch of an ideal to move toward, align with ethics in both the
descriptive and etymological ethos and the prescriptive, teleological “ethi-
cal.” It is harder to understand what she is doing in regard to aesthetics. But
aesthetics, I submit, is a central concern in her essay, integral to her method
both when “aesthetics” is understood in a narrow, technical sense (as art) and
in a broad, etymological sense (related to feeling). In her long opening para-
graph, she specified art as one sphere of life poisoned by capitalism and the
State: the “general confusion” of modern life, with its split between abstract
knowledge and concrete action—for Weil it is a tragedy that the machinist
in the factory usually does not know how to make her product, just how to
pull the levers—“partly deprives [art] of its public, and by that fact impairs
inspiration” (OL 37/41). Further, the question of the revolutionary ideal, as
we saw above, is one of giving it un sens, where that term can be heard as
both direction and sense, orientation and feeling. In this way, part of the task
of providing content to “revolution” is guiding the senses.
 Critique of Revolution 19

For Weil, providing content to political keywords involves engaging

with their political implications. How, on her analysis, do oppression and
responses to it function? And how is this political question related to aesthet-
ics? “The powerful, be they priests, military leaders, kings or capitalists,”
she writes, “always believe that they command by divine right; and those
who are under them feel themselves crushed [se sentent écrasés] by a power
which seems to them either divine or diabolical, but in any case supernatural”
(OL 69/71). Oppression here is a certain feeling, and “times of popular agita-
tion occur,” Weil claims, when both “rebellious slaves and threatened mas-
ters . . . forget how heavy and solid the chains of oppression are” (OL 69/71).
Oppression has weight and density. It is felt, and it is a kind of limitation on
feeling—oppression is a kind of anesthetization. Finally, amidst “this religion
of power,” “each one thinks that power resides mysteriously in one of the
classes to which he has no access, because hardly anybody understands that
it resides nowhere” (OL 111/109). For Weil there is no power per se—only a
struggle for power taken as the goal or end when, in fact, it is a means. The
irony is that, as modern humans have freed themselves from some constraints
of nature, we have enslaved ourselves to the whims of power struggles. What
results is “that dizzy fear which is always brought about by loss of contact
with reality” (OL 111/110). In the context of anguish and anxiety, the domi-
nant feeling is fear. That Weil emphasizes the sense of fear as predominant in
modern society should not be lost on our considerations of her method.
Thus far I have presented Weil’s method in terms of inquiry—in general
as a way of calling into question and, in particular, as a way to question how
words are used and what they mean. I have underscored the importance of
both idealization and aesthetics for her method. I will now transition from
inquiry, the basis of Weil’s method of understanding the reality around her,
to essaying, the basis of Weil’s method of action.

ACTION: ESSAYING REALITY

In making explicit Weil’s method, I would be remiss if my focus remained

only on her method of understanding as exemplified in “Reflections,” what
she called her “inventory of modern civilization [l’inventaire de la civilisa-
tion présente]” (OL 116/114). Weil’s is a method not just of understanding
but also of action. Having written “Reflections,” she applied for a sabbatical
from teaching on June 20, 1934. In her request for leave, she wrote, “I want to
prepare a philosophy thesis concerning the relationship of modern technique,
the basis of large industry, to the essential aspects of our civilization—that
is, on the one hand, our social organization and, on the other, our culture.”5
She also referred to her projected study as her “research.”6 But she was not
20 Chapter 1

preparing an academic manuscript; hers would be an essay of a different kind.

On and off from 1934–1935, she worked in the factories around Paris.
Weil set as the goal of her research method the understanding of her civili-
zation in terms of its society and culture. Her method for such a “thesis” and
“research” was to work amidst the jetsam of her civilization, namely, precari-
ous workers in factories. Understanding was never enough for Weil. That is,
a theoretical grasp—an inventory—of civilization remained limited without
being informed by practical experience. The point was not just to inquire into
the world. It was to act within it with a view toward changing it.
Because Weil’s year of factory work tends to be romanticized by Weil
scholars—a time of pure sacrifice and latent spiritual development—we
would do well to consider its own material conditions. Trying to avoid hagi-
ography when biography is required, in this section, I pay particular attention
the historical events that shaped Weil’s factory year. She rented a small room
on 228 rue Lecourbe to live near her job and to do so (semi-)independently
from her parents.7 Through Boris Souvarine, editor of La Critique Sociale—a
small Leftist journal critical of Stalinism in which Georges Bataille, among
others, would publish—Weil knew Auguste Detoeuf, managing director of
Alsthom Company, which produced electrical machinery for French trams
and underground railways. It was from Detoeuf that Weil acquired her first
factory job; lacking a work certificate, she likely would not have had access
to factory labor without the help of her contacts, whom she knew because
of her elite education. Like so many in Weil’s life, Detoeuf saw the need to
protect her in some sense, asking the factory foreman to keep an eye on her,
a protection her fellow workers did not share.
On Tuesday, December 4, 1934, she began work as a power-press opera-
tor at the Alsthom Company factory. She entered the factory as part of its
most oppressed group, unskilled female workers. Always writing, she kept
a “Factory Journal” to note her observations. It begins with two telling epi-
graphs. The first is from the Iliad and in Greek, translated as “Much against
your will, under pressure of a harsh necessity” (FW 155/CO 29). The second
is from Weil herself and reads, “Not only should man know what he is mak-
ing, but if possible he should see how it is used—see how nature is changed
by him. Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him”
(FW 155/CO 29). Thus, Weil situates her factory year as living under neces-
sity, natural and social, with a view toward a unity of knowledge and use,
intellectual and manual labor. This is to say, Weil was to subject herself to
oppression so as to better understand liberty.
“I’m very happy to have done this after having dreamed of it for so long,”
she wrote in a letter from around December 11.8 “I think more and more that
the liberation (relative) of the workers must be brought about before all else
in the workshop, and it seems to me that I will manage to perceive something
 Critique of Revolution 21

of what that depends on.”9 Due to the economic crisis in France at the time,
Weil was temporarily laid off from Christmas to New Year’s Day. On her first
days back at work, January 2 and 3, 1935, in the coppersmiths’ workshop,
while she placed copper bobbins into and took them out of a furnace, skilled
work was conducted around her. She writes of Friday, January 4, “Totally
different place, although right next to our shop . . . Relaxed and brotherly
atmosphere, no more servility or pettiness . . . At last, a happy workshop.
Teamwork . . . Numerous calculations, needed for measurements” (FW 163/
CO 37–38). There was a sense, then, that in some parts of the factory a partial
union of manual and intellectual labor occurred. But Weil’s delight at this
exception only proved the rule. She was concerned about how education in
France often remained the prerogative of the elite. One result of this classism
was that factory bosses treated workers not as humans who could understand
their tasks or work collaboratively but as mere laborers who functioned
to pull levers and generate products. With Marx, then, Weil observed the
worker’s alienation from product, others, and self.
In a long entry dated Monday, January 14, 1935, she writes, “The effect
of exhaustion is to make me forget my real reasons for spending time in the
factory, and to make it almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest
temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore, which is the one
and only way of not suffering from it” (FW 171/CO 45). To not suffer one
must not think. And after this submission, thought is painful. Despair is the
natural consequence. Moreover, revolt is limited circumstantially: the reality
is that working without efficiency leads to starvation (FW 171/CO 45). From
nearly the beginning of her time in the factories, then, we see Weil developing
what would become a key observation: daily life in the modern factory is felt
painfully as physical and emotional stresses of labor become incorporated.
She had awoken with ear pain on January 10. On January 15, she went to
a doctor and received the diagnosis of otitis. As a result, she moved in again
with her parents on rue Auguste-Comte, where she would stay for over a
month. During this period of sickness, she wrote in a letter about her position
among the factory workers: “My capacity for adaptation is almost unlim-
ited, so that I am able to forget that I am a ‘qualified lecturer’ on tour in the
working class.”10 With an inflamed ear, and now anemic, at the direction of
her parents Weil then went with her mother to Montana, Switzerland, arriv-
ing February 3. Activities in Montana included skiing. With her mother, she
returned to France on February 22, moving back to rue Lecourbe on Saturday,
February 23, and recommencing factory work on Monday, February 25. After
her first week back at work, her headaches began again. At the end of her sec-
ond week back, she learned that she was to be laid off for another two weeks,
from March 8 onward. During this period without work, she wrote to a friend
that “since I am here [in the factory] first of all to observe and understand, I
22 Chapter 1

cannot produce this mental void inside me, this absence of thought indispens-
able to the slaves of modern machinery.”11 (How are we to hear this invoca-
tion of slavery? Is she too quick in using it? My sense is that, because she
was, in the early 1930s, consistently engaged with Marx’s writings, here she
is echoing Marx’s language about workers as slaves to capital.12)
She also wrote to one of her former students from Le Puy that in the fac-
tory she had “escaped from a world of abstractions to find myself among real
men” and that goodness is something real in a factory “because the least act
of kindness . . . calls for a victory over fatigue and the obsession with pay . . .
thought, too, calls for an almost miraculous effort of rising above the condi-
tions of one’s life.”13 She returned to work again on Monday, March 18, but
she left Alsthom in early April. The last day mentioned in her Factory Journal
is Tuesday, April 2. Her certificate of service from Alsthom reads December
4, 1934, to April 5, 1935. It is not clear why she left Alsthom—whether she
quit or was fired remains unknown.
Looking for work in early April, when the unemployment rate was near 20
percent in France, Weil had a conversation with two metal fitters who were
in search of jobs. They spent the morning—presumably Wednesday, April
10—in free conversation “on a plane above the miseries of existence that are
the dominant preoccupation of slaves, especially the women” (FW 199/CO
72). Weil writes of this encounter, “Total feeling of comradeship. For the
first time in my life, in short. No barrier, either in the class difference (since
it is suppressed), or sexual difference. Miraculous” (FW 200/CO 72). This
note reveals how Weil saw her own position during her year of factory work,
namely, that she had sufficiently broken with her class such that she could
truly be a comrade. But it was precisely because she had not done so that she
kept working in the factories; only with her parents’ financial and medical
support, as well as with her connections to Detoeuf, could Weil remain a fac-
tory worker “on tour.”
She restarted work on Tuesday, April 11, 1935, at the J. J. Carnaud et Forges
de Basse-Indre factory at rue du Vieux Pont de Sèvres, Boulogne-Billancourt.
On the first day she did not “make the rate,” but the factory manager told her
to come back the following day anyway.14 Fatigued, and needing fresh air,
she went to rest by the Seine. “In spite of my fatigue [fatigue] . . . there I sit
on the bank, on a stone, gloomy, exhausted [épuisée], my heart gripped by
impotent rage, feeling drained of all my vital substance,” she wrote painfully,
continuing, “I wonder if, in the event that I were condemned to live this life, I
would be able to cross the Seine every day without someday throwing myself
in” (FW 201/CO 73). On April 21, Easter Sunday, in an effort that would
become her holiday tradition, she went to a Catholic church with the hope of
hearing Gregorian chant, but was disappointed. She was then fired from the
second factory on May 7, 1935. Upon asking the foreman why she had been
 Critique of Revolution 23

fired, he said, “I don’t have to account to you for anything.”15 Weil’s journal,
blank for the four weeks she spent at the Carnaud factory, suggests that this
was the most difficult period for her during her factory year.
She then traveled to a number of other factories in an attempt to find
another job. Limiting herself to a daily budget of three francs and fifty
centimes in good ethnographic fashion, by the third week of looking for a
job, she writes, “Hunger becomes a permanent feeling”—more painful than
working.16 On May 31 she applied to the Ministry of Education for a position
teaching philosophy during the next academic year, preferably one near Paris.
Because of this application, Weil knew that her next factory position would
likely be her last. On Wednesday, June 5, after putting on her friend Simone
Pétrement’s makeup to look attractive to the man in charge of hiring, Weil
secured a job at the Renault plant, where she would work the 2:30–10:00 pm
shift running not the presses, as she deeply feared, but a milling machine.
On Thursday, June 6, she writes, “The disadvantage of being in the position
of a slave is that you are tempted to think that human beings who are pale
shadows in the cave really exist” (FW 206/CO 78). Her reference to Plato’s
Republic is indicative of both the impossibility of thinking in the midst of
factory work and the need, which she experienced firsthand, for reorienting
the French polity. At this time slavery was becoming a more important theme
in her journal. On the morning of Thursday, June 27, she had strange reaction
to boarding the W bus.

How is it that I, a slave [moi, l’esclave], can get on this bus and ride on it for
my 12 sous just like anyone else? . . . If someone brutally ordered me to get off,
telling me that such comfortable forms of transportation are not for me . . . I
think that would seem completely natural to me. Slavery has made me entirely
lose the feeling of having any rights. It appears to me a favor when I have a few
moments in which I have nothing to bear in the way of human brutality. These
moments are like smiles from heaven, a gift of chance. (FW 211/CO 82)

Her language here is telling of the shift in her thinking during the factor year.
Now, merely going through the day without oppression is seen as a favor, as
supererogatory. Beaten and fatigued by oppressive labor, she notes that mak-
ing a claim to her rights has become an impossibility. In the modern factory
brutality is naturalized, such that non-brutality is seen as a gift—one from out
of this world, this world of slavery. Only in fleeting moments of non-brutality
could reason develop. Only in the gaps of oppression could liberty be stirred.
Indeed, she continues, her fellow workers, her “comrades,” “haven’t fully
understood that they are slaves,” such that the words “just” and “unjust” only
carry a partial meaning for them, and insofar as they live in a situation “in
which everything is injustice,” their reason cannot develop (FW 211/CO 82).
24 Chapter 1

Even at the “cushy job” on the factory floor, Weil struggled. Her Factory
Journal is dotted with the language of fear (FW 205/CO 77). Though her
Renault work certificate says June 6 to August 22, Weil’s last journal entry
that mentions work at Renault is on Thursday, August 8. According to Weil’s
friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, Weil likely finished at Renault
before August 10, because on August 10–11 she attended the National
Conference of the Alliance against War at Saint-Denis. In total, her “year”
of factory work amounted to around 24 weeks of laboring on the floors of
factories.
In another letter to a friend Weil reflected on her experience in the fac-
tories. She claimed that modern industrial slavery comprised two elements
principally: the increase in pace and the orders from superiors. While the
factory managers continued to demand increased speeds of production, both
fatigue and thinking slowed work. Orders could occur at any time; the result
is that the worker lives in constant fear and dread and, thereby, in a state of
degradation. “The main fact isn’t the suffering,” she writes in one of the last
lines of her Factory Journal, “but the humiliation” (FW 225/CO 96). Her
(and others’) reaction to this slavery—a slavery not only of the precarious
economic circumstances but also contained in the mechanical work itself—
surprised her. “[O]ppression,” she concludes, “does not engender revolt as
an immediate reaction, but submission [n’engendre pas comme réaction
immédiate la révolte, mais la soumission]” (FW 226/CO 96).
Perhaps the most striking example of forced docility comes from a fellow
precarious female worker, documented in Weil’s January 9 entry: “A woman
drill operator had a clump of hair completely torn out by her machine, despite
her hairnet; a large bald patch is visible on her head. It happened at the end of
the morning. She came to work in the afternoon just the same, although she
was in a lot of pain and was even more afraid” (FW 166–67/CO 41). Echoing
Weil’s aesthetic focus in “Reflections,” this documentation also recalls Weil’s
observation in April 1935: “In this kind of life those who suffer aren’t able
to complain . . . Everywhere the same callousness, like the foremen’s with
few exceptions” (FW 203/CO 75). Not only is there an inability to have voice
under conditions of oppression, Weil observes, but the human herself must
also continue working in pain as if she were an anesthetic machine. Yet, Weil
continues in a letter after the year of factory work, “Slowly and painfully, in
and through slavery, I reconquered the sense of my human dignity—a sense
that this time relied upon nothing outside myself.”17 This is a key theme in
Weil’s Factory Journal, what her biographer David McLellan insightfully
refers to as the dialectic of self-respect and humiliation.18 As we have seen, in
Weil’s Factory Journal the latter emerged much more strongly.
In sum, through factory work Weil’s political pessimism deepened. From
her experiences as a worker she could write that the workers are “[t]he class
 Critique of Revolution 25

of those who do not count—in any situation—in anyone’s eyes.”19 She did
not find the means for liberating the workers, as she had written as the goal
of her “research” in her request for a sabbatical. In reflecting on her time in
factories in early August, she asks herself what she gained from her experi-
ence. Her answer:

The feeling that I do not possess any right whatever, of any kind (take care not to
lose this feeling). The ability to be morally self-sufficient, to live in this state of
constant latent humiliation without feeling humiliated in my own eyes; to savor
every moment of freedom or camaraderie, as if it would last forever. A direct
contact with life. (FW 225/CO 95)

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament,” we see that Weil maintains

the language of liberty, but she moves from oppression to humiliation. Her
method of action heightened her sense of suffering, arguably allowing for the
conceptual development of what she would later call malheur (affliction).
In other words, through working in the factory amidst others, Weil began to
understand more potential dimensions of suffering. There are several para-
doxes to how she gained this knowledge. It is noteworthy that she described
increased contact with life and reality only after choosing to be ground down
in surreal, mechanical environments. Her increased appreciation for liberty
and solidarity occurred amidst a context of oppression and instrumentalized
relations.20 For me, Weil’s time spent working in factories raises a number
of questions. In particular, does her choice to work alongside the downtrod-
den limit her comradeship, the sense of “camaraderie” she notes in the lines
above? Is it more akin to liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor,
or to how wealthy people today need intense cycling studios and backpacking
trips to feel contact with reality? In general, what are the political promises of
Weil’s factory work? What can we learn from her method of action?

THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF

UNDERSTANDING AND ACTION

I have presented Weil’s method as twofold, consisting in understanding and

action or, more specifically, in inquiring and essaying. While I have articu-
lated this claim by reading “Reflections” and “Factory Journal” together, I
think we could extend it to much of Weil’s major political writings and exper-
iments (her other essays): from her 1932 “Capital and the Worker” followed
by traveling to study trade unionism in Germany to her 1936 “Antigone”
followed by attending workers’ strikes in Paris to her 1937 “Let Us Not
Start Another Trojan War: The Power of Words” followed by proposing a
26 Chapter 1

frontline nursing corps to restore the balance of the war, Weil consistently
posed and responded to the most pertinent political questions of her day in
theory and then attempted to test her conclusions in practice. This method
itself became dialectical: it was not always a new, clean inquiry followed by
actions responding only to that inquiry; rather, Weil’s developing inquiries
built on previous actions. I would maintain, however, that one principle of
her early writings remained in her method throughout her life: to some extent,
an inquiry into the causes of the political issue must be conducted rigorously
before action is taken, lest that action lead to changes in the appearance of
relations in society without shifting its fundamental organization (what Weil
called its “culture”).
In presenting Weil’s method, I have also underscored her focus on aesthet-
ics—the predominant feelings as well as the role of art in both oppression
and liberty. The purpose of this chapter has been more analytical than practi-
cal: I have raised a question about what Weil’s method is and answered my
question in terms of understanding and action by reading two of her writings
from 1934–1935. But we might also consider a practical note. In assuming
his chair at the Collège de France in 1983, Pierre Hadot invoked the older
philosophia instead of “philosophy,” “reserv[ing] the right to follow this
philosophia in its most varied manifestations and above all to eliminate
the preconceptions the word philosophy may evoke in the modern mind.”21
Above I outlined Weil’s method as pursuing philosophy as a way of life. One
limit of this chapter is that it could function to reduce Weil’s inspiring, con-
tradictory, and multifaceted practice of philosophy—what Hadot calls “varied
manifestations”—simply to the two headings of inquiry and action. To avoid
this reduction, and to take a practical turn, we might consider the varying
promises of Weil’s method.
Weil teaches that there is always more to be questioned and especially more
to be done. We can ask: As we conduct research, whom should we include in
our collaborations, and whose recognition would we seek (Department Chair
or student, Dean or custodian)? How might we supplement the political key-
word of our time, “resistance,” by attending to the aesthetics of oppression
and liberty? And how might we also interrogate other predominant terms,
such as the neoliberal “resilience”? Conducting this attention and interroga-
tion is especially difficult when “[o]urs,” as Rebecca Rozelle-Stone puts it,
reading Weil, “is an age characterized by obsession with watching but an
inability to attend,” when, that is, technological distraction has become “not
simply an individual intellectual problem, but also a fundamentally social/
ethical one.”22

* * *‌‌
 Critique of Revolution 27

‌‌ can consider for a brief example debates in feminist philosophy around

We
the dependency of political subjects and the question of resilience. Influential
legal theorist Martha Fineman argues that “the state is . . . the legitimate
governing entity and is tasked with a responsibility to establish and monitor
social institutions and relationships that facilitate the acquisition of individual
and social resilience.”23 Part of the role of social institutions, on Fineman’s
account, is to “provide for our future well being in the form of savings and
investments.”24 “Human resources,” she continues, “contribute to our indi-
vidual development, allowing participation in the market, and the accumula-
tion of material resources. Human resources are often referred to as ‘human
capital’ and are primarily developed through systems that provide education,
training, knowledge and experience.”25
Reading Fineman’s attempted critique of the neoliberal present through a
call for individual and social resilience, I recall once again Weil’s line from
another early essay, the 1933 “Prospects”: “[O]ne cannot disregard the fact
that all the political currents which now affect the masses, whether they style
themselves fascist, socialist, or communist, tend towards the same form
of State capitalism” (OL 18/23). “It seems fairly clear that contemporary
humanity tends pretty well everywhere to a totalitarian form of social orga-
nization,” Weil went on in “Reflections,” “that is to say, towards a system in
which the state power comes to exercise sovereign sway in all spheres, even,
indeed, above all, in that of thought” (OL 109/108). Weil offers at least two
key insights here. First, she was one of the few thinkers in her time who was
able to abstract away from her own situation in order to examine the very
foundations of political life. As a result, she challenged political philosophers
to look beyond the intellectual hegemony of the state. Her observation prefig-
ures the scholarship of David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, who explain that the
hegemony of the state operates today such that citizens and philosophers alike
“accept the forms and precepts of the state at least to the extent that alterna-
tives become literally and figuratively the state’s unthinkable.”26
The second insight Weil offers regards not just the state but her diagnosis
of “State capitalism.” Fineman exemplifies how accepting the hegemony of
the state and the neoliberal language of resilience can be part of a return to
the logic of capitalism, what Fineman calls “human capital.” Weil invites
political theorists today to decouple systems of human support and care (what
Fineman refers to as education and training) from the logic and vocabulary of
the market. Some contemporary feminist theory has made this point (even if
not reading Weil but, in its method, resonating with Weil’s critique of specific
words). Overall, the language of resilience, Robin James notes, interrogat-
ing the word, in fact “recycles damage into more resources.”27 According to
this logic, “the person who has overcome is rewarded with increased human
capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense, because,
28 Chapter 1

finally, and most importantly, this individual’s own resilience boosts society’s
resilience.”28 Thus, resilience is best understood as a “neoliberal ethical and
aesthetic ideal.”29 James’s critique of “resilience” demonstrates, in the spirit
of Weil, critical inquiry at pains to think in the present.30

METHOD AND COLLECTIVITY

Weil’s method informs her relationship to collectivities. Through her intel-

lectual and physical efforts, her work can be read as an extended reflection
on the tensions between the individual and the collective—that is, on one’s
ability to maintain one’s critical stance and one’s recognition that to realize
the implications of that stance, one must engage in political work with oth-
ers, thus ceding some individuality given the pressures and pulls of collective
life. In “Reflections,” Weil essays the possibilities for freedom given the con-
straints of modern life. She analyzes precisely what links oppression, general
and particular, to the system of production such that she can understand how
oppression begins, subsists, transforms, and might be eliminated. As she saw
it, modern civilization was completely out of balance. Humans were cogs
in a bureaucratic machine as the State—the bureaucratic organization par
excellence—became the center of economic and social life, subordinating
true economic interests to military ones. Further, collectivities such as politi-
cal parties and unions both crushed individuality and in fact reproduced what
they claimed to abolish: bureaucracy, mechanization, a reversal of means and
ends, and a separation of thought and action. In this early essay, then, we see
that collectivities, in their given form, were for Weil on the side of oppression
more often than that of liberty.
Weil’s early essay, however, is not a denial of collectivity per se. Rather,
it sharpens our focus on precisely how collectivities oppress individu-
als. Oppression, Weil argues, depends in part on arbitrary forces at play:
“Actually, in all oppressive societies, any man, whatever his rank may be, is
dependent not only on those above or below him, but above all on the very
play of collective life—a blind play which alone determines the social hier-
archies” (OL 91–92/91). This play is not on a small scale, as it might be in a
village or a cluster of hunter-gatherers. In those cases, one can see, feel, and
talk to those on whom one depends. By contrast, Weil is describing modern
life, in which one has limited knowledge of and access to the person who
delivers one’s food by truck into the city, who sweeps the streets, who makes
the decisions about infrastructure and education, and so on. In this way, mod-
ern collective life is “blind” yet determining.
But why are the determinations of modern social life part of an oppres-
sive society, as opposed to being part of an efficient economic and social
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
whole great army would have thrown off restraint, broken orders
and followed them through the “Hindenburg line.”
But Uncle Isaac, at home, humiliated and sad, went about the
farm with something like a prayer in his old heart.
“Why can’t I do something to help? Don’t make me know my
fighting days are over. What can I do?”
And Uncle Isaac finally had his chance. Perhaps you remember
how at one time during the war things seemed dark enough. Our
boys were swarming across the ocean, and submarines were
watching for them. Food was scarce. Frost and storm had turned
against us. Money was flowing out like water. Spies and German
sympathizers were poisoning the public mind, and the Liberty Loan
campaign was lagging. Uncle Isaac, reading it all day by day in his
paper, felt like a man in prison galled to the soul by his inability to
help. There came a big patriotic meeting at the county town. It was
a factory town with many European laborers. They were restless and
uneasy, opposed to the draft, tired of the war and not yet in full
sympathy with America. Uncle Isaac determined to go to this
meeting, though his daughter did all she could to dissuade him.
There was no stopping him when he once made up his mind, so his
daughter let him have his way, but she sent old John Zabriski along
with him. Old John was a German Pole who came to this country as
a young man out of the German army. He had lived on Uncle Isaac’s
farm for years, and just as a cabbage or a tomato plant seems the
stronger and better for transplanting, so this transplanted European
in the soil of this country had grown into the noblest type of
American. So the daughter, standing in the farmhouse door with
eyes that were a little dimmed, watched these two old men drive
away to the meeting.
They had the speaker’s stand in front of the court house. The
street was packed with a great crowd. Right in front was a group of
sullen, defiant foreigners who had evidently come for trouble. The
sheriff was afraid of them, and inside the court house out of sight,
but ready for instant service, was a squad of soldiers. A young man
who was running for the Legislature caught sight of Uncle Isaac and
led him through the court house to the speaker’s platform, and John
went, too, as bodyguard. The old veteran sat there in his blue coat
and hat with the gold braid, unable to hear a word, but full of the
spirit which had come down to him from the old days.
Something was wrong. Even Uncle Isaac could see that, and John
Zabriski beside him looked grave and anxious. That solid group of
rough men in front began to sway back and forth like the movement
of water when the high wind blows over it, and a sullen murmur,
growing louder, came from the crowd. A small, effeminate-looking
man was making a speech. Very likely his ancestors came originally
to this country two centuries ago, but somewhere back in the years
this man’s forebears had made a fortune. Instead of serving as a
tool to spur the family on to finer things it had been spread out like
a soft cushion to carry them through life without a bruise or bump.
And these rough men, whose life had been all bruise and turmoil,
knew that this soft little American was here talking platitudes when
he should have been over in France. Perhaps you have never heard
the angry murmur of a sullen crowd grow into a roar of rage, until
the crowd becomes like a wild beast. The sheriff had heard this, and
he was frankly frightened. He started a messenger back into the
court house to notify the soldiers, but old John Zabriski stopped him.
“Wait,” he said, “do not that. You lose those men by fighting. We
gain them.”
Then, before anyone could stop him, old John stepped up in front
and barked out strange words which seemed like a command. Then
a curious thing happened. The angry murmur stilled. The crowd
stopped its movement, and then every man stood at attention!
Almost every man there had in former years served in one of the
European armies, and what old John had barked at them was the
old army command which had been drilled into them years before.
And through force of habit which had become instinct, that order, for
the moment, changed that mob into an army of attentive soldiers.
The bandmaster was a man of imagination, and as quickly as his
men could catch up their instruments they began playing “The Star
Spangled Banner.” Poor old Uncle Isaac heard nothing of this. He
could only guess what it was all about until John Zabriski laboriously
wrote on a piece of paper:
“Dey blay der Shtar Banner!”
Then there came into Uncle Isaac’s sad life the great, glorious joy
of power and opportunity. He walked down to the front of the stage,
took off his gold-braided hat and bowed his white head before them
all. And old John Zabriski, the transplanted European, came and
stood at his side. A young woman, dressed all in white, caught up a
flag and came and stood beside the two old men. Then a wounded
soldier with one empty sleeve pinned to his breast followed her. And
there in that sunlit street a great, holy silence fell over that vast
crowd. For there before them on that platform stood the glory, the
pride, the precious legacy of American history. The last Grand Army
man, the European peasant made over into an American, and the
young people who represented the promise and hope shining in the
legacy which men like Uncle Isaac and John Zabriski have given
them.
When the band stopped playing a mighty cheer went up from that
great crowd, and one by one the men of that sullen group in front
took off their hats and joined in the cheering. They made Uncle
Isaac get up again and again to salute, and no less a person than
Judge Bradley shook both hands and said:
“We all thank you, Captain Randall. You have saved this great
meeting and made this town solidly patriotic.” It was a proud old
soldier who marched into the farmhouse kitchen that night, and in
answer to his daughter’s questioning eyes he said:
“Annie, I want you to write those boys all about it. Tell ’em they
are not doing it all. Tell ’em Judge Bradley called me cap’n and said I
saved the meeting. I only wish General Grant could have been
there!”
 All of which goes to show that those of you who have come to
white hair should not feel that you are out of the game yet. Material
things may go by us, but the spirit of the good old days is still the
last resort!
 “SNOW BOUND”
This is the one night of the year for reading “Snow Bound.” Every
man with New England blood in his veins should read Whittier’s
poem at least once a year. That becomes as much of a habit as
eating baked beans and fishballs. For two days now the storm has
roared over our hills and shut us in. It must have been on just such
a night as this that Emerson wrote:

“The sled and traveler stopped; the courier’s feet

Delayed; all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”

Of course, Emerson lived at a time when the telephone and the

electric light and the steam-heated house were dreams too obscure
even for his great mind to comprehend. So, in spite of this fearful
storm, the strong arm of the electric current still reaches our house,
and while the telephone is slow, we can get our message through,
after a fashion. But we are shut in. The car and the truck are useless
tonight. The horses stamp contentedly in the barn—not troubling
about the head-high drifts which are piled along the roadway. A bad
night for a fire or for a hurry call for the doctor; but why worry about
that as we sit here before the fire?
I got my copy of “Snow Bound” in 1872, and I have read the
poem at least once each year since, and I have carried it all over the
country with me. It is a little shabby now, but somehow that is the
way I like to see old friends:
 “Shut in from all the world without
We sat the clean winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat.

...

“Between the andiron’s straddling feet

The mug of cider simmered low,
The apples sputtered in a row
And close at hand the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.

...

“What matter how the night behaved?

What matter how the north wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth fire’s ruddy glow.”

...

There is no finer picture of the old-time Northern farm home, and

we Yankees are bound to think that with all her faults New England
did in those days set the world an example of what a farm home
ought to be. So I lay aside the book and look about me to see how
close New Jersey can come on this fearful night to matching this old-
time picture.
Here we are before the fire. Great logs of apple wood are blazing
up into the black chimney. In Whittier’s day the open fire produced
all the light, but here we have our electric light blazing, and I think
as I sit here how miles away the great engines are working to send
the current far up among the lonely hills to our home. For supper we
had a thick tomato soup, a big dish of cornmeal mush—the grain
ground in our little grinder—pot cheese, entire wheat bread and
butter, baked apples and all the milk we could drink. Just run that
over and see if it does not furnish as fine a balanced ration and as
good a lot of vitamines as any $2 dinner in New York—and nearly 80
per cent of it was produced on this farm. Now the girls have washed
the dishes and planned breakfast, and here we are. Mother sits in
the first choice of seats before the fire. That is where she belongs.
She is mending a pair of stockings, and as her fingers fly, no doubt
she is thinking of those warmer days back in Mississippi. My
daughter has just put a new record into her Victrola. The music
comes softly to us—“Juanita.”

“Soft o’er the fountain

Lingering falls the Southern moon.”

I wonder what Whittier’s folks would have said to that! Two of the
little girls are looking over some music, trying to get the air in “I
dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls!” There is no “frost line” in this
house for the fire to drive back, for there is a good hot-water
radiator in the corner. The pipe from the spring seems to have
frozen, but the faithful old windmill, standing over the well at the
barn, has stretched out its arms to catch this roaring gale and make
it carry the water up to the tank. Thomas and three of the boys are
playing parchesi, while the rest of the company give them all advice
about playing from time to time. I have a big chair by the corner of
the fireplace—where grandfather is supposed to sit—and little Rose
is curled up on my lap eating an apple. I wish you were here. We
could easily make room for you right in front of the fire, and we
would surely call on you for a new story.
The wind is howling on the outside. As we sit here in comfort
there comes an eager, pitiful face at the window pleading to be
taken in. No, it is not the old story of the wayward child coming back
to the lights of home. The nearest we can come to that at Hope
Farm is the black cat with the dash of white at her face and throat.
She and her tribe are expected to stay at the barn and catch rats,
but there she is out in the cold looking in at the window. Mother is
as stern as a Spartan mother when it comes to cats in the house.
She will not have them there. But, after all, they are Hope Farm
folks, and the little girls plead so hard that the good lady looks the
other way when the baby opens the door. In comes the black cat
and, though they were not invited, three of her brothers and sisters
run in with her! So now I shall sit with little Rose on my lap, while on
her lap is a cushion on which the white-faced kitty purrs contentedly.
In the original “Snow Bound” the mug of cider simmered between
the andirons. No hot drinks for us. A little of that cold pasteurized
apple juice goes well. We see no use in cooking apples before the
fire. There is that big basket of Baldwins by the table. Help yourself
—we like them cold. Cherry-top was ahead in the game, but Thomas
has just taken his leading “man” and sent him back to the starting
point. The boy is a good sport. He takes a big bite out of a fresh
Baldwin and goes after them again. The nearest we can come to
“nuts from brown October’s wood” is a big bag of roasted peanuts.
We have all been eating them and throwing the hulls at the fire.
They have accumulated so that Mother’s idea of neatness compels
her to get up and brush them all into the blaze. I did not tell you
that we are starting up our little Florida farm again. Jack will grow a
crop of sugar cane and peanuts.
And so, here in New Jersey, as well as in old-time New England,
we care not how the wind blows or how the storm roars. This is
home, and we are satisfied with it—all of us, from the white-faced
kitty up to the Hope Farm man. We have all worked to make this
home. It is a co-operative affair. None of us could be called rich or
great, yet nothing could ever buy what we see in our big fire. Every
now and then Mother looks up from her work and glances across the
room at me with a smile. I know what she has in mind. Some of us
rise to the power of animals in our ability to communicate thought
without words. Life has been very much of a fight with us, but it
seems worth while as we look at this big room full of eager young
people, content and happy with the simple things of life. As little
Rose snuggles up closer to me and pulls the kitty with her I begin to
think of some of the complaining fault-finding people I know. I do
know some star performers at the job of pitying themselves and
magnifying their own troubles. On a night like this I will wager an
apple that they are pouring out the gloom and trouble like a man
tipping over a barrel of cold water. It’s their rheumatism or their
debts or the Administration or the Republican party, or something
else that they hold responsible for their troubles. I wish I could have
some of those fellows here tonight, and also some of you folks who
know the joy of looking on the bright side. We would do our best to
rub some of the gloom out of them. I will guarantee that any one of
us could, if we wanted to, tell the truth about our own troubles so
that these gloomy individuals would look like “pikers” in their poor
little self-pity! I would like to read extracts from two new books to
them. One is “A Labrador Doctor,” by W. T. Grenfell; the other, “The
Great Hunger,” by John Bojer.
I have just been reading these books, and I shall read them over
again. Dr. Grenfell has given his life to service in the far North
among the fishermen of Labrador. A man of his ability could easily
have gained fame and wealth by practising his profession in some
great city. He went where he was most needed—into the cold, lonely
places where humanity hungers and suffers for help. It has always
seemed to me just about the noblest thing in life for a man of great
natural ability to gain what science and education can give him and
carry that great gift out to those who need it most. Grenfell did that,
and this modest story of his life is wonderful to anyone who can get
the message. I have always thought that the greatest teachers and
preachers and wise men generally are not so much needed in the
big cities as in the lonely country places. The city owes all it has in
men and money to the country, but it will seldom acknowledge the
gift. The city itself is able to offer as a gift knowledge, science and
training. Yet those who receive this gift desire for the most part to
remain in the city, when they should carry their gift out into the
lonely and hard places where the city must finally go for strength.
The storm seems hard tonight, but it is a mere zephyr to the Winters
which Dr. Grenfell’s people endure. I wish I could tell you some of
the wonderful things which have happened in that lonely land. At
one place the doctor found a girl dying of typhoid. There was no way
of saving her, and as soon as she was buried it was necessary to
burn the rude bunk and the straw in which she lay. They carried it to
the top of a hill and built a fire. For several days one of the fishing
boats had been lost at sea in the fog, and had been given up for lost
with all on board. The despairing men in that boat—far out at sea—
saw the light when that hideous bed was burned and were able to
get to land! Some of you self-pitying people ought to read how Dr.
Grenfell organized a little orphans’ home to care for the little waifs of
this lonely place. In one case a little girl of four, while her father was
away hunting, crawled out into the snow, so that both legs were
badly frozen. Gangrene set in halfway to the knee, and the father
actually chopped both legs off to save her life! Think of such a child
in the frozen North. I think of her as little Rose hugs the kitty close.
Dr. Grenfell took this child, operated on her, obtained artificial legs,
and now she can run about like other children. I wish I could tell you
more about this book. At one time two men came together after
medicine. One took a bottle of cough mixture, the other a strong
turpentine liniment for a sprained knee. By mistake they mixed up
the medicine. One rubbed the cough medicine on his knee, the other
drank the liniment. If I had some fellow who thinks the Lord has put
a special curse on him before our fire tonight I would tell him what
others have endured. The chances are we could make him
contribute something to the cause before we were done with him.
The other book I mentioned, “The Great Hunger,” is a story of
Norwegian life and, as I think, very powerful. A boy born to poverty
and disgrace grew up with a great hunger in his heart—he knew not
what it was. He felt that power and material wealth would bring him
the happiness he sought. He gained education, power, wealth and
love, yet still the great hunger tortured him. Poverty, sickness, the
deepest sorrow fell upon him, and at last the great hunger was
satisfied by doing a needed service for the man who had done him
the most hideous wrong! I wish I could tell you more about it. It is a
powerful book; but it is time for little Rose to go to bed. Off she
goes with a hug for all, and the children follow her one by one. I am
not going to put more logs on that fire. Let it die down. The end of
the day has come. Let the storm howl through the night like a pack
of wolves at the door. They cannot get at us. Even if they did they
can never destroy the memory of this night.
 “CLASS”
The other day the papers announced the death of the ex-Empress
Eugénie. She lingered along, feeble and half-blind, until she was
nearly 95 years old. She has been called “the Queen of Sorrows,” for
few other women have lived a sadder life. Very few of this
generation knew or cared anything about her. I presume most of our
young people skipped the details of her life as given in the papers.
Yet when I was a boy, shortly before the war between France and
Germany, the women of the world regarded this sad empress as the
great model of beauty and fashion. I suppose it would be hard for
women in these days to realize how this beautiful empress dictated
to people in every land how they should arrange their hair and wear
their dresses. At that time most women wore their hair in short nets
bunched just below the neck, and it was the age of “hoopskirts”—
most of them, as it seemed, four to five feet wide. Just how this
woman managed to put her ideas of fashion into the imagination of
her sisters I never could understand. From the big city to the little
backwoods hamlet women were studying to see what “Ugeeny”
advised them to wear. I have often wondered if in her last days the
poor, blind, feeble woman remembered those days of power.
Her death brings to mind an incident that had long been
forgotten. I had been sent to one of the neighbors to borrow some
milk, since our cow was dry. In those days, any caller—even a little
boy—was like a pond in which one went fishing for compliments.
The woman of the house, an immense, fat creature, with the shape
of a barrel, a short, thick neck and a round moon face, had arrayed
herself in glad clothes of the latest style—several years, I imagine,
behind Paris. She wore an immense hoopskirt, which gave her the
appearance of walking inside of a hogshead. Her hair was parted in
the middle and brought down beside her wide face to be caught in a
net just below her ears. I know so little and care so much less about
style in clothes that I can remember in detail only two costumes that
I have ever seen women wear. This outfit is one of them.
“This is just what Ugeeny is wearing,” said the fat lady as she
poured out the milk. “You can tell your aunt that you have seen one
lady dressed just like Paris.”
It did not strike me as very impressive, but I was glad to have the
experience.
“You can tell her, too, that a very fine gentleman came here today
and said I looked enough like Ugeeny to be her half-sister—dressed
as I am now. He has been in Paris, too.”
“It was a book agent,” put in her husband, “and sold her a book
on the strength of that yarn. Say, Mary, you don’t look any more like
Ugeeny than old Spot does—and you don’t need to.”
“The trouble with you, John Drake, is that you have no idea of
beauty.”
“I know it. I may not have any soul, but I’ve got a stomach, and I
know that you can make the best doughnuts and Indian pudding
ever made in Bristol County. That’s more than Ugeeny ever did, or
ever can do. You are worth three of her for practical value to the
world, and I think you a handsome woman—but you can’t look like
her, because you haven’t got the shape, and I’m glad of it.”
But where was there ever a woman who could be satisfied with
such evident truth, and who did not reach out after the impossible?
She turned to old Grandpa, who sat back in the corner, away from
the light.
“Now, Grandpa, you seen a lot of the world. What do you say?
Don’t I look like Ugeeny?”
Old Grandpa nodded his white head and looked at her critically.
“You’re in her class, Mary—that’s what I’ll say—you’re in her
class!”
 “You’re in her class,” repeated Grandpa. “The people in this world
are divided into two classes—strung together like beads on different
strings. Some strings are like character, others like looks or shape or
thinking or maybe meanness. You can’t get out of your class—for
the Lord organized it and teaches it. You look at me; I’m in the class
with some of the finest men that ever lived on earth!”
“Now, Mary, see what you’ve done,” said John Drake. “You’ve got
Grandpa started on that class business. He’s worse than Ugeeny.”
But Grandpa went right ahead. “Ain’t I in the class with the old
and new prophets? Here I have for years been telling what is coming
to the world. Folks won’t always be down as they are now. My wife
killed herself carrying water and fuel to get up vittles and keep the
house clean. Some day or ’nuther every farmhouse will have water
and heat and light right inside. There’ll be power to do all this heavy
work. In those days farmers will be kings.”
The old man’s face lighted up as he talked.
“You don’t believe me now, but it will all come. I’m out ahead of
the crowd. So was Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and
Charles Sumner on the slavery question. Folks hooted at them,
laughed them down and did all they could to stop their ideas. But
you can’t stop one of these ideas when there’s a man back of it.
Those men lived to see what the world called fool notions made into
wisdom. They just had visions which don’t come to common men.
That’s what I’ve got now, and what I ask is, Ain’t I in their class?”
“If I was in your place I wouldn’t mind, Grandpa,” said Mary, as
she shook out that great hoopskirt. “That’s not good talk for boys; it
makes them discontented!”
“But that’s why they’ve got to be if the world is going ahead,” put
in Grandpa. “What’s the matter with farming today, I’ll ask?
Education has all gone to other things. Farmers think the common
schools are plenty good enough for farmers, while the colleges are
all for lawyers and such like. You mark what I say—some day or
’nuther there will be farm colleges as big as any, where farming will
be taught just like lawing or doctoring. Then people will see that
farming is agriculture, and the difference between the two will
change the world. This Ugeeny doesn’t amount to much as a
woman, and I don’t believe this Prince Imperial will ever rule France,
but Ugeeny has put women like Mary in her class. These clothes look
foolish to me, but every woman who follows Ugeeny in dress gets
into her class, and it’s like a schoolgirl passing from one grade to
another, for some day they’ll pass out of that hoopskirt and that bob
net for their hair and rise up to better things, and it will be Ugeeny
that started them. She may be only a painted doll, but she has given
the women ideas of beauty and something better than common.
Sometime or ’nuther you will see the result of her idle life. That’s
why I say Mary’s in Ugeeny’s class. She’s got the vision of beauty
and something far ahead of you, John. You are smart and strong,
but Mary’s getting class. That hoopskirt and that net are not prisons
—they help to set her free.”
“Well, Grandpa,” said John, good-naturedly, “I suppose, according
to you, I ought to put on a swallow-tailed coat every time I milk.”
“No; not when you milk, John, but if you shaved every day and
put on your best clothes once a day for supper, you would get in the
upper class, and carry your boys with you. But I ask this boy here,
ain’t I in their class?”
I was sure of it, but just then we heard the horn sounding far
down the road. I knew that Uncle Daniel had grown tired of waiting
for the milk, so he blew the horn to remind me that I was still in the
class of errand boys.
In August of that year I went up on Black Mount after
huckleberries, and ran upon Grandpa once more. He sat on a rock
resting, while Mary and three children were picking near by. The hill
was thick with a tangle of berry vines and briars, with snakes and
woodchucks as sole inhabitants. Old Grandpa sat on the rock and
waved his stick about.
 “In my younger days this hill was a cornfield. I have seen it all in
wheat. Farmers let education and money get away, and, of course,
the best boys chased out after them. But it won’t always be so.
Some day or ’nuther this field will come back. It won’t pay in these
coming days to raise huckleberries in this way. They will be raised in
gardens like strawberries and raspberries. This hill will have to
produce something that is worth more—peaches or apples.”
“But how can they make peaches grow on this sour hill, Grandpa?”
asked one of the boys. “There’s a seedling now—10 years old and
not four feet high!”
“They will bring in lime for the soil as they will coal in place of
wood. I don’t know how it will be done, but some day or ’nuther
they will use yeast in the soil as they do in bread to make it come
up, and they’ll harness the lightning to ’lectrify it. You wait till these
farm colleges give us knowledge. And farmers, too. They won’t
always stand back and fight each other and backbite and try to get
each other’s hide. Some day or ’nuther grown-up men and women
are going to see what life ought to be. They will come together to
live, instead of standing apart to die. I may not see it, and people
laugh at me for saying what I know must come true. But didn’t they
laugh at Columbus? Didn’t they try to kill Galileo? Wasn’t Morse
voted a fool? Hasn’t it always been so with the men and women who
looked far over the valley and saw the light ahead? And, tell me this:
Ain’t I in their class?”
That was 50 years and more ago. I had forgotten it, and yet when
I read the headlines announcing the death of Empress Eugénie I had
to put the paper down, for there rose before me a picture of that
sunny Summer day on the New England hills. On the rock in that
lonely pasture sat old Grandpa pointing with his stick far across the
rolling valley, far to the shadow on the distant hills, where he knew
the immortals were awaiting him—as one who had kept his soul
clean and his faith undimmed. I wish I could look across the valley
to the distant hills with the sublime hope with which he asked his old
question:
 “Ain’t I in their class?”
A year or two ago I went back to the old town. Ah, but if Grandpa
could see it now! The old house with its “beau” windows and new
roof seemed to be dressed with as much taste as Eugénie would be
if she were still Empress of France. There were power and light and
heat all through it. Two boys and a girl were home from an
agricultural college—one of the boys being manager of the local
selling organization. Black Mount was a forest of McIntosh and
Baldwin apple trees, the old swamp was drained and lay a thick mat
of clover. Grandpa’s vision had come true—all but one thing.
Education and power had brought material things, which would have
seemed to be miracles to John and Mary. Yet farmers were not
“kings,” after all, as Grandpa said they would be, for there was still
discontent and talk of injustice. But, after all, that is what Grandpa
said—“That’s what they’ve got to be, if the world is going ahead.”
Perhaps, after all, a “divine discontent” is the noblest legacy of the
ages.
But in the churchyard back in one corner I came upon Grandpa’s
grave. It was not very well cared for. It had not been trimmed. A
bird had made her nest and reared her brood right by the side of the
headstone. It was a lonely place. As I stood there a cow in the
adjoining pasture put her head over the stone wall and tried to gnaw
the grass on that neglected grave. And this was what they had
carved on the stone:
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away!”
If I could have my way I would put up another stone with this
inscription:
Grandpa.
“He has entered their class.”
 “I’LL TELL GOD”
Just at this time many people seem to be concerned about what
they call “the unseen world.” That means the state of existence after
death. Many of our readers have written asking what I think or know
about this. Most of those who write me seem to be living in lonely
places or under rather hard conditions. They have all lost wife or
husband, parent, child, or some dear friend. Now like most other
reasoning people, I have tried to imagine what really happens to a
human being after what we call death, and I have had some curious
experiences which you might or might not credit. When I was a boy,
I was thrown much into the society of avowed spiritualists. I knew
several so-called “mediums” and attended many “séances.” The
evident clumsy and vulgar “fakes” about most of those things
disgusted me, yet I must admit that some of these “mediums” did
possess a strange and peculiar power which I have never been able
to understand.
Most of these sincere “mediums” seemed to be people who had
suffered greatly and had carried through life some great affliction or
trouble over which they constantly brooded. I have come to believe
that the blind and deaf and all seriously afflicted see and understand
things which most others do not. An afflicted person is forced to
develop extraordinary power in order to make up for the loss of the
missing limb or organ or faculty. The blind man must learn to see
with his fingers and his ears. The deaf man must hear with his eyes
or develop a sort of quick judgment or instinct of decision. The man
plunged into grief or despondency at the loss of fortune, friends or
health must rise out of it through some extraordinary development
of faith and hope and will-power. Someone has said that the blind or
deaf man is “half dead,” and in his efforts to do anything like a full
man’s work in the world, he must borrow power from the great
“unseen world.” For example, I will ask you this question: Take a
woman like Helen Keller, without sight or speech or hearing. Take a
man who is totally deaf and also blind—how would they know
physically when they are dead? I think I can understand why it is
that real advancement in true religion and Christian thought has for
the most part been made by some “man of sorrows,” or people who
through great affliction have been forced to go to the “unseen
world” for help!
Years ago, in a Western State, there lived a farmer. I do not know
whether he is living now or not. Perhaps he will read this. Perhaps
he has gone into the silent country to learn what influence the little
child had with the Ruler of the universe. This man was deaf.
Through long years, his hearing had slowly failed and its going left a
dark discouragement upon him. He owned his farm and was
moderately well-to-do. A hard worker and honest man, he went
about his work mechanically, through habit, with a great hunger in
his heart. He did not know what it was; a longing for human
sympathy and love. His wife was a good woman but all her
childhood had been starved of sympathy and poetry and she could
not understand. She made her husband comfortable and loved him
in her strange, inexpressive way, but it is hard, after all, to get over
the feeling that the afflicted are abnormal and strange. They had no
children, their one little girl had died in babyhood. Sometimes at
night you would see the deaf man standing in the barnyard at the
gate, looking off over the hills to the west where the clouds were
glorious in the sunset. And his practical wife would see him standing
there with the empty milk pail on his arm. She could not understand
the vision and glory, the message from the unseen world which filled
her husband’s soul at such times. So she would go out to the
barnyard, shake her dreaming husband by the arm and shout in his
ear:
“Wake up and get that milking done.”
She meant well, and her husband never complained. She meant to
save his money, but he knew in such moments that money never
could pay his passage off through the purple sunset to the “unseen
land.”
Some day, I think I will tell some of the “adventures in the
silence,” which fall to the daily life of the deaf man. One Saturday
afternoon this man and his wife drove to town together. While his
wife was doing her shopping the man walked about to meet some of
his old friends. As he stood on the street, a sharp-faced woman
came out of the store followed by a little child. It was a little black-
haired thing with great brown eyes which carried the look of some
hunted wild animal. A poor thin little thing with a shabby dress and
tattered shoes. As she passed, the child glanced up at the farmer
and saw something in his face that gave her confidence, for she
smiled at him and held out her little hand. The woman turned
sharply and the frightened child stumbled over a little stone.
“You awkward little brat,” shrilled the woman, “take that,” and with
her heavy hand she slapped the thin little face. Then something like
the love of a lioness for her cub suddenly started in that farmer’s
heart. Many fool jokes have been made about “love at first sight,”
but it is really nothing short of a divine message when two lives are
suddenly welded together forever. Under excitement, the deaf are
rarely dignified, but they are strangely and forcibly emphatic. The
woman quailed before the roar of that farmer and the little girl ran
to him and held his hand for protection. A crowd gathered and
Lawyer Brown came running down from his office.
“I want this child,” said the farmer. “You know me; get her for
me.”
It was not very hard to do. The woman had married a man with
this little girl. The man had run away and left her (I do not much
blame him), and this “brat” had been left on her hands.
“Take her, and welcome,” said the sharp-faced woman. “A good
riddance to bad rubbish.”
So Lawyer Brown fixed it up legally and the deaf man walked off
to where his wagon stood, with the little girl hanging tight to his big
finger.
When the woman came with her load of packages, she found her
husband sitting on the wagon seat with the little girl sitting on his
lap. She had found that she could not make him hear, so she just sat
there looking into his face, and they both understood. But the good
woman did not understand.
“What do you mean by picking up a child like you would a stray
kitten? Put her down and leave her here.”
But that was as far as she got. Her husband looked at her with a
fierce glare, and there was a sound in his throat which she did not
like. I can tell you that when these good-natured and long-suffering
men finally assert themselves, there is a great clumsy force about it
that cannot be resisted. And when they got home and the little child
sat up at the table between them, something of mother-love stirred
in the woman’s heart. She actually tried to kiss the little thing, but
the child trembled and ran to the farmer and climbed on his knee.
The woman paused at her work to watch them as they sat before
the fire, and something that was like the beginning of jealous rage
came into her heart, for it came to her that this little one had seen
at once something in her husband’s life and soul that she had not
been able to understand.
There was something more than beautiful in the strange intimacy
which sprang up between the deaf farmer and the little girl. In some
way she made herself understood and she followed him about day
by day at his work or on his lonely walk of a Sunday afternoon. You
would see her riding on the wagon beside him, standing near as he
milked, or holding his finger as he came down the lane at sunset. On
a sunny Sunday afternoon, you might come upon them sitting at the
top of a high hill with the old dog beside them, looking off across the
pleasant country. And as the shadows grew longer, they would come
home, the farmer carrying the little one, and the old dog walking
ahead. I cannot tell you the peace and renewed hope which the little
waif brought to that farmer’s heart through the gentle yet mighty
force of love. And the farmer’s wife would look out of the window
and see them coming. She could not walk with her husband through
lonely places and make him understand, because she had never
learned how. Yet the little one was drawing the older people closer
together and was showing them more of the greatest mystery and
the greatest meaning of life. But there came a Sunday when the
little one could not walk over the hills. The day was bright and fair,
the farmer stood looking at the cool shadows of the blue pines sadly
and the old dog put his head on one side and regarded his master
curiously. They could both hear the voice of the hills calling them
away. And the voices came to the little one, hot and weary with
fever, tossing on her little bed upstairs. The doctor shook his head
when they called him in. The child was done with earthly things,—
surely called off into the Country Unseen just as love and home had
come to her. The farmer went up into the sick-room where his wife
sat by the little sufferer. This man had never regarded his wife as a
handsome woman, but he was startled at her face as she bent over
the child. For at last in the face of death and sacrifice, love had
really come to that woman’s lonely heart, and the joy of it
illuminated her face like a lamp within.
The farmer was left alone with the child. She knew him and
beckoned him to come near and moved her lips to speak. The man
lay on the bed beside her and put his ear close to the little mouth,
but try as he would, he could not hear her message. I suppose there
can be no sadder picture in the book of time than this denial by fate
of the right to hear the last message of love from one passing off
into the long journey from which there comes no report. Hopeless
and bitter with disappointment, the man found pencil and paper and
a large book and gave them to the child. Sitting up in bed with a last
painful effort the little one painfully wrote or printed a single
sentence and gave it to him with her little face aflame with love. He
hid the note in his pocket as his wife and the doctor came in—for
the message from the unseen world seemed to him too sacred for
other human eyes.
The woman watched her husband closely and wondered why he
felt so cheerful as the days passed by. The little one was no longer
with him, yet he went about his work with cheerfulness and often
with a smile. She could not understand, but now and then she would
see him take from his pocket an envelope, open it and read what
seemed to be a letter. He would sometimes sit before the fire at
night, silent and thoughtful. As she went about her work, she would
see him take out this mysterious letter and read it over and over, as
one would read a message from a friend very dear of old and happy
days. And she wondered what it could be that brought the happy,
beautiful smile to his face, and then there came the time when one
evening in June the sun seemed to pass behind the western hill with
royal splendor. It seemed as if there had never been such gorgeous
coloring as the western sky put on that night, and the practical wife
looked from her back-door and saw her husband standing in the
barnyard gate like one in a glorious vision. The cows stood in the
lane, the empty milk pail hung on a post, yet the farmer stood
gazing off to the west unheeding the call to his work. And as the
woman waited she saw her dreaming husband take that mysterious
letter from his pocket and read it once more. She could see the look
of joy which spread over his face as he read it. And this plain,
practical woman, moved by some sudden impulse, walked down to
the gate and put her hand gently on her husband’s shoulder. He
started out of his dream and looked guiltily at the empty milk pail,
but she only smiled and pointed to the paper he had in his hand. He
hesitated shyly for a moment, and then he passed it to her. It was
just the scrawl which the little child had written after her failure to
make him hear. It was the last message from one who stood on the
threshold of the unseen country, and was permitted to look within.
And this was what the woman read, written in straggling childish
letters:
“I’ll tell God how good you are.”
And the shy, unresponsive man and woman, starved of love and
sympathy through all these years, standing in the lonely silence of
that golden sunset knew that God’s blessing had fallen upon them
out of the unseen country through the influence of that little child.
 A DAY’S WORK
“Well, boys, I’m going to quit and call it a day!” As the Hope Farm
man spoke he got up from his knees in the strawberry patch and
proceeded to straighten out his back. It was half past four on
Saturday, September 4. Our week’s work was done—all but the
chores. Our folks had picked and packed and shipped four big
truckloads of produce, with a surplus of nearly 100 bushels of apples
and 60 baskets of tomatoes ahead for next week. This in addition to
regular farm work—and one day off fishing for the boys. It does not
seem possible that September has come upon us! I do not know
how she even got here—yet the big hand on the clock’s calendar
points to that date. When the foolish finger of “daylight saving”
appears on the clock we can discount it, but there is no discounting
the mark on the calendar. That is like the finger of fate. Yet it seems
out of date. We have not finished picking Gravenstein apples. In
former years Labor Day found us clearing up the McIntosh. This year
we have not even touched them! Last year the Mammoth sweet corn
was about cleaned out in August. Now we are beginning to pick. The
season and the calendar are fighting this year. Now if they will both
turn in and hold Jack Frost up for a couple of weeks later than usual
we will forgive the season.
This morning I took this strawberry job from choice—surely no
one else wanted it. Thomas had not come back from his night on the
market. Philip cleaned up the chores, while the rest went to picking
apples and tomatoes. My daughter goes across the lawn with 100 or
more chickens at her heels. They are black Jersey Giants and R. I.
Reds going to breakfast. Out on the cool back porch Mother is
playing the part of family “Red.” That is, she is canning tomatoes.
This porch is screened in, and there is an oil stove to put heat into
the canning outfit. The lady is peeling a basket of big red fruit; her
hands and arms are well smeared with the blood—not of martyrs,
but of tomatoes! This job of mine would make one of those model
gardeners too disgusted for comment. We set out the strawberry
plants in April, in rows three feet apart, the plants two feet in the
row. The soil is strong, and we wanted to push it hard. So in part of
the patch we planted early peas between the rows, and in the rest
early potatoes. The theory of this plan is sound enough. You get a
big crop of peas and potatoes, and take them out in time for the
berry plants to run out and cover the patch. In practice this does not
always work. While the pea and potato vines stood up straight we
kept the patch clean. Then came a time when these vines fell down
and refused to get up. Then came the constant rains and the crab
grass, and weeds came from all over to seek shelter under these
vines. Before we could interfere the patch was a mass of this foul
stuff, and the long rains kept it growing. The richness of the soil
delayed ripening of the potatoes, and by the time we got them out
the strawberry plants seemed lost in the tangle. Here I am cleaning
up this mess. Most of the work must be done with the fingers—a
hoe would tear up too many runners. You have to get down on your
knees and pull. As I crawl across the patch I leave a pile of weeds
behind me like a windrow. I hold up my fingers and it seems
surprising that they are not worn down at least half an inch. If I had
kept those peas and potatoes out of here the berries would be far
better, and I would not have this crawling job. I am not to be alone
here after all. That big black chicken leaves his crowd on the lawn
and comes over here to scratch beside me. The Jersey Giants are
very tame and enterprising. This one stays right at my elbow for
hours—the only member of my family to take this job from choice.
He will have all the worms I can dig out!
There is a rattle and a sputter on the driveway and the truck
comes snorting into the barnyard. At the same time Tom and Broker,
the big grays, come down the hill with a load of apples. Tom scents
the gasoline and pricks back his ears with a snort. You can see him
turn his head as if talking to sober old Broker:
“That fellow thinks he’s smart, but what fearful breath he has! For
years we went on the road like honest horses and did all the
marketing on the farm. Why does this man keep such a great
awkward thing around? It may have speed, but I’ll bet it eats him
out of house and home!”
“Well, now,” said old Broker, “every horse to his job. Working right
on this farm is good enough for me. Let that truck do the road work,
says I. No place like home for an honest horse like me.”
“Not much. I like a little life now and then. I want to get out on
the road among horses and see what is going on. That great, lazy,
smelling thing has got us farm-bound where nobody sees us or
knows what we are doing. And look at the gasoline that thing eats
up, and its keep—my stars!”
“Well, you have something of an appetite yourself. A gallon of oats
costs something, too. I’ll bet this man can’t feed and shoe and
harness you for less than $200 a year! Let’s be glad this thing takes
some of the work off our shoulders!”
“But I saw this man’s bill for repairs”—but there came a jerk on
the lines and “Get up!” and Tom put his mighty shoulders into the
collar and pulled the load up to the shed, while the truck with a
snort that sounded like a sneer moved on into the barn—just as if a
repair bill for $273 was a very small matter.
Thomas was tired—as you might expect after a night on the
market. The load sold for $106.95. It was a mixture of corn, apples
and tomatoes. That looks right at first thought, but one year ago the
corresponding load of about the same class of goods brought $143.
That is about the way they have gone this season. Our prices are
certainly lower, and every item of cost is higher. There can be no
question about that, yet our friends who buy food are paying as
much as they ever did. But for the truck we would be worse off than
we are now. We never could handle our crop with the horses. It is
more and more necessary to get the goods right into market
promptly and with no stop. While the truck has become a necessity,
let no man think that it works for nothing. Old Tom is right in saying
that I have a bill for $273 for refitting the truck this year and putting
it in shape for the season. That item alone will add quite a few cents
to the cost of carrying each package. Some of the smaller farmers
on well-traveled roads are selling at roadside markets. This is a hard
life, and includes Sunday work, and I understand that for some
reason people are not buying such goods as they did. The retail
trade is rarely satisfactory when one produces a fairly large crop. I
think the plan for the future will mean a combination of farmers to
open a store in the market town and retail and deliver their own
goods co-operatively.
My back feels as if there were three hard knots in it. I must
straighten them out by a change of occupation. I am going up on
the hill to look at the apple picking for a time. Little Rose, barefooted
and bareheaded, dressed in a pair of overalls, trots along with me.
She eats two tomatoes on the way up, and then I find her a couple
of mellow McIntosh. The dirt on the tomatoes has been transferred
to her little face, and I think some of it follows the apple into her
mouth. Oh, well, these scientists will probably find vitamines in dirt
before they are done. We are picking Gravensteins today—big rosy
fellows—some of the trees running 15 bushels or more. I planted a
block of these trees as an experiment. Now I wish I had more of
them. The last lot brought $5.25 per barrel. I do not care much for
them for eating, but as baking apples they sell well. This year any
big apple brings a fair price. For instance, that despised Wolf River
has been our best seller. The boys own several trees of Twenty
Ounce, which are bringing about $20 per tree this year. Cherry-top is
going to Paterson this afternoon to put some of his apple money into
a bicycle. I have told in past years how I gave my boys a few
bearing apple trees and how they have bought others. These trees
have given surprising returns. The larger boy is just starting for
college, and his trees will go a long way toward paying expenses.
The objection to giving such trees or selling at a low price is that the
boy finds the income very “easy money.” It would be better for him
to plant the young tree and stay by it till it comes in bearing. The
only chemical I know of for extracting character out of money is
warm sweat. I’d like to spend the day on the hills—here in the
sunshine with the apples blushing on the trees and the grapes
purpling on the walls and the clouds drifting over us. But that would
never clean up those strawberries, and so little Rose and I go down
on a load of apples—big Tom and Broker creeping down the steep
hillside as if they realized that here was a job which the truck could
not copy.
I got at those weeds once more. Philip had carried several bushels
to the geese, and these wise birds make much of them. The big
sow, too, stands chewing a big red root as a boy would chew candy.
Nearby on a grassy corner little Missy has been tied out. She is a
very proud little cow, for just inside the barn her yellow daughter lies
in the straw—pretending to chew her small cud. We shall have to
call this young lady Sippi to complete her mother’s name. Missy has
given us a taste of real cream already. But here is a pull at my
shoulder, and little Rose, her face washed and hair brushed, comes
to lead me in to dinner. There will be 14 of us today. I wish you
could make it 15. The food is all on the table, so we can see what
there is to start with. Have some of this soft hash. That means a
hash baked in a deep dish, with considerable liquid in it. You may
think we live on hash, but a busy Saturday is a good time for
working up the odds and ends. Then you can have boiled potatoes,
boiled beets, sweet corn, tomatoes, bread and butter, baked apples
and all the milk you want. We are all hearty eaters, and I figure that
if I took my family to the restaurant in the city where I sometimes
have my dinner, the bill would be about as follows:

Hash $4.20
Potatoes 1.40
Beets 1.40
Sweet corn 3.60
Tomatoes 1.40
Milk .90
Bread and butter 1.40
Baked apples 2.30
$16.60
 That is a very low estimate of what this dinner would cost us. Now
what would a farmer get at wholesale for what we have eaten? Not
quite $1.30 at the full limit. Last week I ordered a baked apple and
was charged 30 cents for it! But no matter what this dinner would
cost elsewhere, it is free here, and I hope you will have another
baked apple. Try another glass of milk. Our folks have a way of
pouring some of that thick cream in when they drink it.
That dinner provided heart and substance to all of us. I am back
at those berries, and Philip has come to help me. Our folks have
stopped picking apples for the day and will cut sweet corn fodder—
where the ears have been picked off. That will have to be our “hay”
this winter. The women folks and a couple of the boys have started
for town to do a little shopping. Philip and I have a pile of weeds
here as large as a henhouse, and the strawberry plants as they
come out of the tangle look better than I expected. A car has just
rolled in with a family after apples. One well-groomed young man is
viewing me appraisingly over his glasses. He is talking to the soft,
fluffy young woman at his side. “Is that the Hope Farm man? A
rather tough-looking citizen! Why does he do that very common
work? He ought to hire that job done and get up out of that dirt!”
This young man will never know what it will mean next Spring
when the vines are full of big red berries to know that he saved
them and with his own labor turned them from failure to success. He
probably never will know any such feeling—and that is his
misfortune. This weed-pulling gets to be mechanical. It doesn’t
require much thought and I have a chance to consider many things
as we work. A short distance away is that patch of annual sweet
clover. The plant we have been measuring is now 60 inches tall and
still growing. The plants are seeding at different dates—some of
them earlier than others. What a wonder this clover will be for those
of us who have the vision to make use of it.
But my day’s work is over—I’m going to adjourn. I am quite sure
that I could have picked 50 bushels of Gravenstein apples from