Simone Weil

After being directed to Simone Weil by a friend, I found an essay about her entitled, "Toward a Weilian Philosophy of Vocation" by John Marson Dunaway. Here are some quotes I might want to come back to later:

For the French, traditionally since Pascal and right on up through Proust, Sartre, and Camus, the writer's craft has often been considered a vocation, a role in which one carries the responsibility for being a kind of conscience of a nation. Simone Weil fits admirably well into that traditional mold, and her deep gladness most certainly lay in meeting the world's deep need. Hence the central importance in her work of rootedness as a way of meeting our obligation to provide the needs of the human soul.

...From Casablanca in 1942 she wrote to Father Jean-Marie Perrin: "My vocation imposes upon me the necessity of remaining outside the Church, without so much as engaging myself in any way, even implicitly, to her or to the dogmas of Christianity, in any case for as long as I am not quite incapable of intellectual work. And that is in order that I may serve God and the Christian faith in the realm of the intelligence."

...Her writings were not being widely circulated, and now her attempts to obtain a sacrificial mission in the resistance were falling on deaf ears. Her need for heroic action was being utterly frustrated.