03-17-2025

This past Sunday morning, after a short night due to my avid reading of Simone Pétrement’s biography, I woke up in a rising mental fog from which emerged the following:

Avant de mourir, je veux savoir tellement de choses que tout me surprendra

I wrote it down right away. Unusual for me to do this, these days. I mostly write comments on the margin of my books or … build up this-here diary! In this case, this bit of thinking – obviously inspired by Simone’s Weil’s constant outpouring of notes, essays and article + the urgency of on-time note taking –  ends up here because, if I come up with a good translation for it, it will reinforce my Canto General side!

Before I die, I want to acquire so much knowledge that everything will surprise me.

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Last night, again, I read until midnight. I want to finish this book!

Simone Weil is sliding into mysticism, as she seems to sense that death is at her doorstep. She is weak, she is often exhausted and she is obsessed with her Plan for Frontline Nurses, which would bring her closer to her own martyrdom. Obsessed also with baptism, although she has long ago decided it was not for her. Both, martyrdom and baptism, clearly center on her destiny, not that of the working class or the humanity of humanity! Here, she is not as compelling. I cannot agree more with her when she rejects a god whose book of books preaches death for his enemies and, in my case, there is no return from this extreme. All I have kept from Simone here, is that the notion that god is not universal except according to the global catholic/christian minority’s dogma. She demands to remain free to choose an other god. For this, she is called a heretic and some priest brandishes the ‘anathema sit’ (be her anathema!) threat! What else? Had her life crossed that of el Grand Inquisitor, she would have been declared a sorceress and burned at the stake.

This disinterest for dogmatic brawls got to me … around three o’clock in the morning. I closed the Pétrement book and opened the ‘Reflexions on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, which had not even been opened yet! Why? It may have extinguished the urge and the need for Pétrement’s introductory biography? For sure I would not have developed such a familiarity with this unmatched, woman philosopher and would have found myself in front of yet an other faceless book to read! But it happens to be as clear and to the point as the best foreword of a French classic by the author her/himself. Clear, to the point and accessible, to the end. And the most concise critique of marxism as a dogma. Simone Weil will not be cornered, by Marx or by Jesus.

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