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| Simone Weil [Wikipedia] |
from Simone Weil’s Waiting for God, tr. Emma Craufurd:
we
must do nothing more than we are irresistibly impelled to do, not
even in the way of goodness . . .
I have the essential need, and
I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and
complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so
far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and
disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are,
putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them
so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as
they are, it will not be they whom I love . . .
the
social is irremediably the domain of the devil . . . By social I do
not mean everything connected with citizenship, but only collective
emotions . . . I do not want to be adopted into a circle, to live
among people who say “we” and to be part of an “us” . . . I
feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a
stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without
exception. . . .
my
greatest desire is to lose not only all will but all personal being .
. .
As
I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my
own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into
my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it, for I had really
forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it
difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue.
What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still
today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever
circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having
the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately
the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received
forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron
the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since
then I have always regarded myself as a slave. . . .
The
special function of the intelligence requires total liberty, implying
the right to deny everything, and allowing of no domination. Wherever
it usurps control there is an excess of individualism. Wherever it is
hampered or uneasy there is an oppressive collectivism, or several of
them. . . .
the natural tendency of every form
of collectivism, without exception, to abuse power. . . .
the
development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and
almost the sole interest of studies. . . .
If
there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the
desire for light produces it.
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