Gravity and Grace

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Summary: They called her the Red Virgin
Review: Simone Weil's writings were impenetrable for me in the fifties. Now I have most of her works and I am frequently amazed at how penetrating are her ideas and thoughts, and how contrary to most thinking today. That in itself recommends her. She understands people, life, and suffering, and sees its purpose. She sees through all falseness to the goodness. Simone Weil is the most honest person I know or have heard of. Yet while her classmate, Simone de Beauvoir is famous Simone Weil is relatively unknown. She loves Plato, Buddhism, Geometry, Jesus, working people, her homeland, France, but she rejected the Catholic Church, baptism, and Judaism (her background). She is a saint if there ever was one. I am profoundly grateful for having known something of her, her diamond mind, and her beautiful soul.

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Summary: The struggles of a Russian Jew
Review: This is a case of Dialectic Materialism approached through a Nietzsche perspective, a woman as an idealist scholar with an extraordinary Jewish background whose brother suffers the loss of his life at the hands of Nazis! Simone Petrement, Simone Weil's biographer and classmate [Ecole Normale et al], clearly presents the defeating struggles with which Ms. Weil must but stealthily reveal! To say she deplored her Jewish background would be to deny her devotion to her parents which could not completely be. Her struggle is not her with Jewism itself but with the affliction of her father, Dr. Bernard Weil (1872-1955) and her mother, the daughter of Mme. Reinherz. Try the perils of the afflicted Russian Jew who no longer finds palatable the mere potatoes which she herself chose. She subtly [quietly]pleaded for her parents' assistance and then rejected their offers through her inner anxiety, a struggle to preserve Humanity amongst those who spoke Omniscient Salvation in other languages but offered moral support to Russian Jews who didn't appreciate the blasphemy of stating "Jesus Christ" over and over again! Thus is the subtle and controversial attitude.

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Summary: Mind-blowing aphorisms...
Review: This young lady's writings and personal story blow away most other 20th Century thinkers. These are mainly short blasts. Provocative. Accessible. Yet push you further than you've likely been. Lots of ancient Christian desert hermit influence (St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, Philokalia) on this revolutionary, radical mind. Timeless. Challenging. Simple. Confounds modernism.