Simone Weil has died!

At Grosvenor Sanatorium in Ashford, where she had been transported from Middlesex hospital in London. She entered into a coma on August 22, 1943 around 5:00 pm, did not regain consciousness and expired at 10:30 pm, Simone Pétrement reports in her biography. She quotes Doctor Broderick, who was treating her then:

“Her death must have been calm”.

In one of the last conversations they had, Simone told Broderick, who believed she had

“… achieved complete detachment, knowing that she was going to die” … “She told the doctor that she was

she was a philosopher and interested in humanity.”

At the bottom of the last page of Simone Weil’s biography by Simone Pétrement, last  night, just past midnight, I scribbled that I could not believe I would ever be so moved by the long past death of a person I have never met. But this person happens to be SIMONE WEIL, one extraordinary philosopher aged 34 – on August 22nd, 1943.   

To say that I never met her is not true. I actually lived with her for the 539 pages of Simone Pétrement’s book. Much more than a book. An intimate filing of thousands of loose leaves of paper and manuscripts. Intimate and trustworthy because one could not be close friend with Simone Weil without being intimately trusted by her. And vice-versa. I am not sure she uses the word Reciprocity as a component of trust. I do. This reading confirmed me in the necessity of reciprocity in seminal dialogues. This book might just have been a shared work!

Yesterday, Gwylène and I had a shopping day. We went to our favorite superstore, (one where employees are all treated as essential workers and where DEI remains an internal policy) and loaded up for a month-or-so. As our cart was being checked out, the attendant congratulated us for its fullness! I replied that it had, indeed, to last a month. “No, she argued, you can do much better than that!” Her perfidious (playful) language and the irony in her voice inferred that we had such a good time shopping for such good products that … we would  surely have to be back before a month!

We liked the back and forth. It even got us going about mass consumption and the predictability it entails. How is it though that we can speak of predictability in human behavior when we know that the thousands of cars we are on the road with at this moment, all come from and go to different places, for different reasons, in different cars … not speaking of the diversity of drivers, their family, their race, their education, their job, age, sex, number of children, gender identity, favorite sport, first name of maternal grand-mother, immigration status, social security number! What about that? It’s a puzzle! … We reflect further. Then, Gwylène, always attentive: maybe this diversity should give us a sense of infinity, she says! Why is it that we have such a difficulty imagining an infinite universe when we can appreciate the infinity of diversity? My answer was inspired by Simone Weil, of course! It is her refusal to be limited in her thinking by anything at all, which made her what she was: a stubborn genius for clarity and clairvoyance, at a time the world was on the verge of self-destruction, precisely for having fallen under the rules of various fascistic, mind control-based, ideologies. A sense of infinity should, for one, greatly reduce world anxieties, fixated on border crossing, legal or not.

I guess, from infinity, it was difficult for the two of us to self-restrict and not spill over into the topic of eternity!  The non-existence of a final moment that would put an instant limit to history? … I was tempted to ask myself whether to even imagine an end to eternity and infinity constituted, in itself, a denial of both?

That’s when Gwylène wondered whether there was ‘a contradiction’ between humans who have a beginning and an end, a birth and a death – and their ability to conceive of  infinity and eternity at all.

In my loose philosophy and from what Gwylène says, can I venture that …

(1) if grasping the dazzling diversity of individual destinies can give humans a sense of infinity,

(2) similarly, if considering the just-as-dazzling turns history has taken to get us where we are, can give humans a sense of eternity,

(3) and considering what I now call the humanity of Humanity,

… can I venture that what ties together eternity with infinity is the humanity of Humanity?

And can I call on Simone Weil’s philosophy, whose interest lies in H(h)umanity?