1. A single individual there knew her work well. He had undertaken a pilgrimage to Ashford in search of her grave. She appeared to the others to be an austere shadow, the tone of their accounts coloured by an aversion to her severity. It seems sometimes that even if one partakes in today’s taste for the puritanical, one cannot always stomach Simone Weil’s asceticism.
2. Once while
talking about Hume and causality, a member of the group, visibly moved,
began removing his shoes so as to throw them at me and thereby
demonstrate the invariance of natural law. I’ve had to relearn that
philosophy itself can be not merely frustrating but terrifying.
3. For me, the vocabulary of community building is coloured somewhere between light blue to light grey, almost opaque in tone.
4. The work was deemed largely irrelevant by the Gaullists, such that the head of de Gaulle’s Intelligence Service in London said, “[Weil’s] kingdom was not of this world”. He is only right in as much as he recognises the profundity of her revision to respect’s conceptual heritage, that bluish grey transparency.