Like George Orwell who wrote the truth of poverty to draw attention to it, Weil chose to live among the working poor, worked as a farmhand (leaving farm-house accommodations to sleep in the barn), and ultimately died in 1943 due to malnutrition from eating only what French prisoners were allotted by their German captors. Alla ting jag ser, hör, vidrör, andas, förtär; alla väsen jag möter – alla dem hindrar jag att få beröring med Gud, och jag hindrar Guds beröring med dem, i samma mån som någonting hos mig säger ’jag’”. All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. We have to pass through death… When the universe is weighing upon the back of a human creature, what is there to be surprised at if it hurts?

In it, Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one volume a compendium of her writings. Someone standing on a mountain’s slope can only see the part of the mountain they are standing on, but someone standing on the mountain’s peak can see the entire mountain. Big names like Julian Bream and big works like Britten’s harrowing Curlew River were often on the bill. To fully feel life course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator. After having passed some weeks with me, finding that she was treated with too much consideration, she decided to go and work in another farm so that, a stranger among strangers, she might share the lot of real agricultural labourers.I remember one professor and his wife - I was somehow certain that this guy was an emigrated Russian Lit prof, so intense was his soulful appreciation of all music. Seeing their value, he soon published these writings and a decade later, they were translated into English. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him).Simone Weil is mentioned several times in the correspondence of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (compiled in the book "Striving Towards Being"). She looks upon “attachment” as a “manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached” (Gravity and Grace). Likewise, Simone explained how “through work man turns himself into matter, as Christ does in the Eucharist. I remember a young working-class Lorraine girl in whom she thought she had detected signs of an intellectual vocation and to whom she poured forth at great length magnificent commentaries on the Upanishads. After a brilliant academic career at school and university, she taught philosophy interspersed with periods of hard manual labor on farms and in factories.