The Simone Weil Reader Simone Weil ,

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a teacher, classical scholar, philosopher, political activist and seeker of the truth. She confronted the rootlessness of modern life and the death of the spirit in an age of materialism. Her writing was visionary and her vision, radical.Born in France, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Weil inspired T.S. Eliot to say of her, We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint. Today, nearly sixty years after her death, her work has, perhaps, an even greater immediacy and relevance. This book is a collection of the best of her writings from The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty and Gravity and Grace.

Simone Weil must be read in toto or in an anthology such as this superb collection. Her musings on "The Iliad: A Poem of Force" (from whence Hannah Arendt derived the concept of the banality of evil) are linked organically to her thoughts on the degradation of factory life, Catholic mysticism, and anarchism. What emerges from these pages is a self-portrait of a troubled polymath, who found refuge in God and hell in politics.