SIMO E WEIL This page intentionally left blank SIMONE WEIL AND THE INTELLECT OF GRACE By Henry Leroy Finch Edited by Martin Andic Foreword by Annie Finch CONTINUUM NEW YORK 2001 The Continuum Publishing Comp 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Copyright © 1999 by Annie Ridley Crane Finch All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Continuum Publishing Company. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Finch, Henry Le Roy. Simone Weil and the intellect of grace / by Henry Leroy Finch edited by Martin Andic; preface by Annie Finch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-1190-8 ISBN 0-8264-1360-9 (pbk) 1. Weil, Simone, 1909-1943. I. Andic, Martin. II. Title. B2430.W474F54 1999 194-dc21 99-32607 CIP Contents FOREWORD BY ANNIE FINCH vvii ABBREVIATIONS xi INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN ANDIC 1 Chapter 1. Affliction, Love, and Geometry 11 2. Gnosis 23 3. Intellect and Grace 31 4. Cantor, Infinity, and the Silence 42 5. T. E. Lawrence and the Purification of Evil 51 6. Marx, Oppression, and Liberty 59 7. Nationalism 70 8. Heidegger, Science, and Technology 83 9. Love in Abandonment 92 10. Recovering the Sacred in Humanity 104 11. The Life and Death of Simone Weil 116 12. Time and Timelessness 128 NOTES 136 BIBLIOGRAPHY 166 INDEX 169 v This page intentionally left blank Foreword by Annie Finch ALL MY FATHER'S INTENSE and wide-ranging intellectual passions, O F outlined by Martin Andic in the introduction to this collection, Simone Weil was the object of his most enduring and devoted study. And yet, although he began work on a book about Weil almost twenty years before his death, this is the first book of his writings about Weil to be pub- lished. I like to think that in the years during which my father was writing books on Wittgenstein and other subjects, and postponing the long-planned assem- bly of a collection on Weil, he was developing the life-wisdom he would need to address Weil adequately. Although it would have been wonderful if he could have finished editing this collection himself, at least, by the time he began to put this book together in his last months of life, he had attained a level of serenity and insight beyond that which had been available to him ear- lier. When my father finally resumed work on Weil, six months before his death from cancer, he was too weak to carry a pile of books by himself. I cleared away the many stacks of books and papers around his chair (with his charac- teristic sense of duty and honor, he had been finishing another manuscript, on the mystic Da Love-Ananda, that he had promised and felt obligated to write). Under his direction, I carried books and manuscripts about Weil and arranged them in piles on the tables in his study. He told me that the Weil book would be easy, since he had been carrying it around in his head for many years. He asked me to bring him a legal pad, and he began to write. In the last weeks of his life, he was too weak to write himself and dictated the remaining essays to my mother and to a dedicated nurse named Elie Joseph Hercule. He was still working on this book the day before he died—on VII viii Foreword August 22, close to Simone Weil's own death-day. I told my father that I would get the Weil book published, and since I am a poet, not a philosopher, I was lucky that his devoted friend Martin Andic agreed to edit and introduce this collection, which impresses me anew with the vividness and intensity of my father's thinking. In conclusion, I offer the following elegy from my collec- tion Calender, a poem which I wrote for my father's memorial service. VIGILS In memory of Henry Leroy Finch, August 8, 1919-August 22, 1997 "Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal's wide spindrift gaze towards paradise." -Hart Crane, "Voyages" "If a lion could talk, we couldn't understand him." —Ludwig Wittgenstein Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly past the long edge of the last human shore, there are deep windows the waves have not opened, where night is reflected through decades of glass. There is the nursery, there is the nanny, there are my father's magnificent eyes turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy? His is the death that is circling the stars. In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies, three of us are watching, one of us is staring with the wide gaze of a wild sea-fed seal. Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves, and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass. We wait outside time, while time collects courage around us. The vigil is wordless. Once you saw time pushing outward, that day in the nursery when books first meant language, as your mother's voice traced out the patterns of letters. You saw Foreword ix words take their breath and the first circles open, their space collapse inward. They sparkled. Your pen would scratch ink deliberately, letters incised like runemarks on stone as you heard, quoting patiently: Wittgenstein, Gutkind, Gurdjieff, or Weil. You watch the longest, move the furthest, deliberate in pulling into your body. You stare towards your death, head arched on the pillow, your left fingers curled. Your mouth sucking gently, unmoved by these hours and their vigil of salt spray, you show us how far you are going, and how long the long minutes are, while spiralling night watches over the room and takes you, until you watch us in turn. He releases the pages. Here is the mail, bringing books, gratitude, students, and poems. Here are kites and the spinning of eternal tops, icons, parades, monasteries and boardwalks, gazebos, surprises, loons and unspeaking silence. Pages again. The words come like a scent from a flower. Geometry is clear. Language is natural. The truth is not clever; cats speak their own language. You are still breathing. Here is release. Here is your pillow, cool like a handkerchief pressed in a pocket. Here is your white tousled long growing hair. Here is a kiss on your temple to hold you safe through your solitude's long steady war; here, you can go. We will stay with you, loud in the silence we all came here for. Night, take his left hand, turning the pages. Spin with the windows and doors that he mended. Spin with his answers, patient, impatient. Spin with his dry independence, his arms warmed by the needs of his family, his hands flying under the wide, carved gold ring, and the pag flying so his thought could fly. His breath slows, lending its edges out to the night.