Kirjahaku

Invitation borrowed from Henry David Thoreau So we go about indefatigably, chanting our stanza of the lay, and awaiting the response of a kindred soul out of the distance. Limitation from Ishikawa Takiboku A poem should be a strict report of events taking place in one's emotional life - a straightforward diary. This means it has to be fragmentary. Description by Walt Whitman: I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches ...] But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there . . . Postscript by Simone Weil: The Recognition of God and Man. Electra encounters a young man in the cemetery where her father, the king, is buried after his asassination. It is her brother, the son of the king although she does not recognize him. If these verses are read without thinking of the story of Electra and Orestes, the mystical reso-nance is obvious (hear it from no other voice - never again to part). If after that the story as it appears in Sophocles is thought of, the evidence becomes greater. It is a matter of recognition, a frequent theme in folklore. One believes to have before oneself a stranger and it is the most beloved. This is what took place between Mary Magdalene and a certain gardener. Electra is the daughter of a powerful king, but re-duced to the most miserable state of slavery on the orders of those who have betrayed her father. She is hungry. She is in rags. Affliction not only op-presses her but degrades and embitters her. But she does not give in. She hates these enemies of her father who have complete power over her. Only her brother who is far away could save her. She is consumed by the waiting. Finally he comes but she is unaware of it. She believes she is seeing a stranger who announces his death and carries his ashes. She falls into a boundless despair, she wants to die. But even though she no longer hopes for anything, not for one instant does she dream of giving up. She only hates her enemies the more intensely. While she is holding the urn, weeping, Orestes, who had taken her for a slave, recognizes her by her tears. He tells her that the urn is empty. He reveals himself to her. There is a double recognition. God recognizes the soul by her tears and then he allows himself to be recognized. It is when the exhausted soul has ceased to expect God, when outer affliction or inner aridity makes her believe that God is not a reality; if, in spite of that, she continues to love him, if she has a horror of the good things here below that would replace him: it is then that God, after a while, comes to her, shows himself, speaks to her, touches her. This is what Saint John of the Cross calls the dark night . . . Sophocles is the Greek poet in whom the Christian quality of inspiration is the most obvious and per-haps the most pure. (To the best of my knowledge, he is far more Christian than any other tragic poet of the last twenty centuries.)

Contents of Simone Weil: Bilingual Essays: Translator's Note The Greek Pater (Lord's Prayer) & Simone Weil's French Version Love, by George Herbert & A French Translation Profession de Foi Profession of Faith Autobiographie spirituelle Spiritual Autobiography R flexions sur le bon usage des tudes scolaires en vue de l'amour de Dieu Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies as a Way to Come to a Love for God Cette Guerre est une guerre de religion This War is a Religious War R flexions sans ordre sur l'amour de Dieu Various Reflections on the Love of God Bibliography Postscript On the thirteenth of April 1942] Simone Weil wrote to Jo Bousquet . . . "I was very moved . . . to see that you had paid real attention to some pages I had shown you . . . Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." (In Simone P trement, Simone Weil: A Life, tr. Raymond Rosenthal, p. 462) On Simone Weil Diogenes Allen, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Princeton University: She was a spokesperson on behalf of striking workers, a volunteer teacher in night schools for railroad workers, and an active trade unionist. By working in factories and on farms she sought to understand how the oppression of work could be alleviated and the social hierarchy dismantled. She once gave shelter to Trotsky (and is said to have argued him into the ground over the nature of social oppression), was a soldier at the front in the Spanish Civil War, sought dangerous service in World War II and served with the Free French in London. If personal heroism is a recommendation . . . Weil's credentials are impeccable. ("Liberation from Illusion," www.religion-online.org) Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature 1957: I am still convinced that Simone Weil is the only great mind of our times . . . For my part, I would be satisfied if I could say that, with the humble means at my disposal, I helped to make known, to disseminate, her work, whose full impact we have yet to measure. (www.hermenaut.com) T. S. Eliot, Nobel Prize in Literature 1948: In trying to understand her, we must not be distracted - as is only too likely to happen on first reading - by considering how far, and at what points, we agree or disagree. We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints. (Preface, The Need for Roots, p. vi) Gustave Thibon, French Catholic lay theologian: People have found it possible to speak of a 'pathological predisposition to suffering' in connection with Simone Weil. That does not amount to very much: purely psychological explanations, when applied to anyone of such dimensions, suggest a garment that is absurdly tight and splits in all directions . . . She sailed for New York in May 1942. Shortly before our separation, I saw her again in Marseilles . . . To recall the details of this last conversation and to make of it just a memory among others seems to me a profanation today; things which pass beyond time cannot be confined to the memory. I will only say that I had the impression of being in the presence of an absolutely transparent soul which was ready to be reabsorbed into original light. I can still hear Simone Weil's voice in the deserted streets of Marseilles as she took me back to my hotel in the early hours of the morning; she was speaking of the Gospel; her mouth uttered thoughts as a tree gives its fruit, her words did not express reality, they poured it into me in its naked totality; I felt myself to be transported beyond space and time and literally fed with light. (Simone Weil as We Knew Her, tr. Emma Craufurd, pp. 122-123)