[lit-ideas] Re: Simone Weil
- From: Austin Meredith <Kouroo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2004 05:30:40 -0400
>Speaking of Simone Weil, I read Gravity and Grace. It was one of those
>books I read where, for the most part, I didn't have even the slightest clue
>what was going on. For example, here are some random aphorisms. Can anyone
>tell me what any of these mean?
>
>"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws of gravity
>analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception."
>
>"To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral gravity
>makes us fall towards the heights."
About all I could recommend, Erin, is that you should make a second attempt
to read Simone Weil's _Gravity and Grace_. This could be important, and
helpful, to you. Perhaps, when you took your existentialism class, you were
still immature. Perhaps now, by the time you return to it, something within
you will have subtly unknowingly altered, and you will find clarity where
before the reading was only baffling. Such grace does occur.
In an attempt to explain Simone, please allow me to spin a parable. There
was this planet on which life evolved. Live evolved by chasing down and
eating other life. Billions of years went by. Trillions of times, one form
of life chased down and caught and horrifically executed another form of
life, and ingested its bleeding corpse. Evolution happened, because the
organisms that excelled at catching, or at not getting caught, survived,
while those that did not excel at this perished. Eventually a form of life
evolved, that was so efficient in catching, or at not getting caught, that
it took over the planet. It was called human. All over the planet, humans
were catching each other, and attempting to escape from each other. It was
supremely, sublimely bloody. Then, the story goes, there was this one
human, in one place at one time, who declined to continue in this bloody
business. Everything in the history of that planet has been redeemed by
that one act. We all learned about this person when we were children,
because that one act had made all the previous blood and sacrifice
worthwhile. Then there was this rocket made up of three stages. First the
first stage burned to get the rocket seventy miles up from the planet's
surface, above the atmosphere. Then the second stage burned to get the
rocket into orbit six hundred miles up from the planet's surface. Then the
third stage burned to send the rocket to the moon, and so on and so forth.
A nose cone splashed into the Pacific Ocean, and eventually a dude in a
dusty space costume walked into the President's office and handed him a
fragment of moon rock. The dude in costume explained: "This is payload --
all that other stuff was just rocket science."
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