Tờ báo này,
Gấu vớ được trong đống sách báo cũ, chưa biết vứt đi đâu, sau hai mùa
lạnh, đốt
lò chưa hết. 1966, 1 trong những số báo đầu tiên khi ra hải ngoại, mua
dài hạn,
trên bìa còn cái địa chỉ.
Có bài về
SW, thật tuyệt. Và 1 bài về Szymborska, khi chưa được Nobel văn chương.
Bài thơ Bước Ngoặt Thế Kỷ, The Turn of the
Century mà TV đã đăng, có tên khác, là The
Century's Decline.
Alfred
Kazin:
Simone Weil,
Unlikely Saint
[Tít bài viết, trang bìa tờ NYRB, April 18, 1996]
A Genius of
the Spiritual Life
In breaking
away from Partisan Review to found his own journal, Politics, Dwight
Macdonald
did something altogether splendid and moving, in getting to clear new
moral
ground, away from Leninism, Trotskyism, the usual hates and polemics of
the
left. I owe to Politics my discovery
of Simone Weil, whose essay "The Iliad: Poem of Force" astonished and
moved me at the end of 1945 by removing the stage heroics of the Trojan
War and
presenting the true horror of war, death by death by death, as the
submission to
merciless impersonal force that was the fate of innocent millions
during
Hitler's war:
The true
hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is force. The force that
is
wielded by men rules over' them, and before it man's flesh cringes. The
human
soul never ceases to be transformed by its encounter with force-is
swept on,
blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath
the
power of that which it suffers.
Force makes
a thing of its victims. There where someone stood a moment ago, stands
no one.
The
piercing
simplicity of Simone Weil's style went to the heart of the lasting fear
of the
war, of the Holocaust, of the forgetfulness it made imperative for so
many
people. The simplicity was what was left after war-it was elemental,
absolute
in its sense of what was true, the final truth, about war. As I read it
I thought
of a photograph taken by the Germans themselves during the war. A
Polish Jew in
rags reduced to total helplessness, rigid with terror, utterly at the
mercy of
these soldiers in battle dress laughing at him, waits for whatever more
it is
they want to inflict on him. So another Jew was mocked by Roman
soldiers.
Simone Weil,
a Jew, had been deprived of her lycée teaching job because of her
"race." So ordered by a good French Catholic whose middle name was
Xavier. She had written "The Iliad: Poem of Force" in Marseilles in
1940 while waiting with her parents to come to the United States.
Refugees all.
Surely it was the fate of the Jews scribed by Vichy's own clerical
Fascists,
whose police rounded up more Jewish children than the Nazis demanded
that had
led her to describe so trenchantly the domination by force.
I couldn't
have been more wrong.
She was
Jewish and looked it, but was obdurate, half-manic, in denying the
Jewish
sources of Christianity. She saw nothing in the Old Testament but the
wars
waged by the ancient Israelites against their national rivals and their
extermination. Simone Weil, born in Paris to a Jewish doctor of
Alsatian
background and a Jewish mother born in Rostov on-Don, despised herself
for
being a Jew. Being labeled a Jew by her own people, the French,
apparently
troubled her more than the chance of being murdered because she was a
Jew.
"Assimilation" never saw a Jew more eager to deny herself. She
declared herself so entirely French that she boasted she had learned to
read
through texts by Racine and Pascal.
Reading
this, I remembered wandering into the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
in July
1945 and discovering on a wall the lines that Pascal had feverishly
scribbled
in his "night of vision" -a text discovered only after his death, on
a paper sewn into the lining of his coat:
From about
half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve-FIRE.
God of
Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and
scholars.
Certitude,
certitude, feeling, joy, peace.
God of Jesus
Christ.
Thy God will
be my God.
I had
just
been presented with a school edition of Pascal by a group of French
professors
to whom I had lectured in Paris. I was uplifted by it. This was truly a
gift
for life. Pascal combined the greatest possible intelligence with the
most
acute need of God. In a style that already astonished me by its perfect
transparency, he brought me to my knees-this in the universe of death
that was
the war world of the Jews:
Advantages of the Jewish
People. In
this search the Jewish people at
once attracts my attention by the number of wonderful and singular
facts which
appear about them.
I first see
that they are a people wholly composed of brethren. Being thus all one
flesh
and members one of another, they constitute a powerful state of one
family.
This is unique.
This
family,
or people, is the most ancient within human knowledge, a fact which
seems to me
to inspire a peculiar veneration for it .... If God had from all time
revealed
Himself to men, it is to these we must turn for knowledge of the
tradition.
None of this
appears in Simone Weil, who coupled Pascal with Racine in demonstrating
her
cultural reverence as a French patriot. She hotly denied the Jewish
roots of
Christianity, to the wonder of Catholic friends impatient to see her in
the
Church; saw the Jews as the "impure element" that kept her out. She
liked to recite the Lord's Prayer in Greek, but made nothing of Jesus'
praying
to Our Father and in the Gospels reiterating "My Father, Our Father."
She called herself a Christian, and in her extraordinary notebooks
described
herself as a tormented pilgrim coming close to the Church but never
able to
join it. Living in New York (on Riverside Drive), she permitted herself
to
enter one synagogue-in Harlem, attended by Ethiopian Jews. Her loyalty
was to
the downtrodden, the poor, the eternal victims- "afflicted" like her,
therefore desperate for a new and truer world in which justice alone
would
rule.
What a
tormented, gifted, madly aspiring creature! Extremes were all. In the
Thirties,
on the surface still another leftist Jewish intellectual, she was
briefly in
the Spanish Civil War, with an independent radical brigade (not
Orwell's).
Maladroit in everything, the world external to her, she managed to get
her foot
into a pot of burning oil. Her father, the doctor, had to bring her
home.
Constantly attended and protected by her parents, obsessed by what she
considered the superior gifts of her brother Andre (soon to be a
world-famous mathematician
at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study), she was truly of
"immoderate
Jewish temperament." (This said by a Catholic who protected her even as
she alarmed him.)
But in her
Jewish excess of zeal, she was as bold as Orwell in denouncing the
crimes
committed in Spain by Loyalists. I discovered in Ignazio Silone's
beautiful
autobiographical essay on how he went from the Church to the Communist
Party,
"A Choice of Comrades," the astonishing letter Simone Weil wrote in
1938 to the novelist Georges Bernanos on her experiences in Spain. She
wrote
because Bernanos, the passionate Cathlic, had denounced the horrors of
Franco's rule in Majorca in his searing
Les grands cimetières sous la Lune.
I have never
seen, either among the Spaniards or among the French who have come here
to
fight or to amuse themselves (the latter often being gloomy, harmless
intellectuals) anyone who expressed, even in private conversation,
repugnance
or disgust for, or even only disapproval of, unnecessary bloodshed. You
talk of
fear. Yes, fear has played a part in these killings; but where J was J
did not
find it played as large a part as you ascribe to it. Men to all
appearances
courageous, when dining with friends, would relate with a warm,
comradely smile
how they had killed priests or "fascists" -a word of elastic meaning.
J felt that whenever a certain group of human beings is relegated, by
some
temporal or spiritual authority, beyond the pale of those whose life
has a
price, then one finds it perfectly natural to kill such people.
When one
knows that one can kill without risk or punishment or blame, one kills;
or, at
least one smiles encouragingly at those who kill. If one happens to
feel some
revulsion, one hides it, one stifles it, fearing to be seen lacking in
virility. There seems to be in this some impulse of intoxication which
it is
impossible to resist without a strength of mind which T am obliged to
consider exceptional,
since J have not found it in anyone. On the contrary, I have seen sober
Frenchmen whom I had not previously despised who of their own accord
would
never have ·thought of killing anyone-plunging with obvious relish into
that
blood-soaked atmosphere. The very aim of the struggle is blotted out by
an atmosphere
of this kind. Because the aim can be formulated only in terms of the
public
good, the good of human beings; and human beings have no value.
She left
safe refuge with her parents in New York to join the Free French in
London. She
had a fantasy: to be parachuted into France to serve as a nurse right
in the
front lines. De Gaulle thought her nuts. She was shunted off to write a
program
for postwar French recovery, L' Enracinement
(The Need for Roots). This extraordinary
document was not exactly what French politicians had had in mind.
Inflexible
in everything, she would not eat more than the French were getting on
wartime
rations, and in fact, she ate less. Extremely ill from tuberculosis,
she now
literally starved herself and died in England at thirty-four.
Weil could
not say, like many another Jewish prophet, "Zeal for thy house hath
consumed me." The Jews were not her house. Neither was the world
itself.
But zeal for the divinity she absolutely believed in certainly consumed
her. In
the ghastly trial of humanity that was Hitler's war, she, too, would
have been
obliterated if her posthumously published notebooks had not revealed
her, in all
her excess, as a genius of the spiritual life. * Representing nothing
and no
one but herself, she was no more with the Church than she was with the
Jews. As
William Blake said, "Organized religion: an impossibility." Like so
many homeless believers before her, she was speaking as "the Alone to
the
Alone."
But
apparently the spirit shows itself, even if it is not passed on, in
writing
like Weil's-breaking through the crust of convention, "final"
-sounding, naked and desperate. The sense of affliction that dominated
her was
really a kind of gift. It made her see the world in the severest light.
I finally
understood her when I realized that her demand was less for God than
for total
justice. That was God. And the demand, the quest, the inability to give
up
anything, did drive her nuts. The only real question to be asked of
another:
What are you going through? Attentiveness without an object is prayer
in its
supreme form. Christianity is, in effect, apart from a few isolated
centers, something
socially in accordance with the interests of those who exploit the
people. What
we love is joy itself. When we know this, even hope becomes
superfluous; it no
longer has any meaning. The only thing left to hope for is the grace
not to be disobedient
here below. The rest is the affair of God alone and does not concern
us. That
is why I lack nothing. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything
in this
world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity
to give
one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. It is
almost
a miracle; it is a miracle. We do not obtain the most precious gifts by
going
in search of them but by waiting for them. How can we go toward God?
Even if we
were to walk for hundreds of years, we should do no more than go round
and
round the world. Even in an airplane we cannot do anything else. We are
incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step toward the
heavens. +
* Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks
(Oxford University Press, 1970, out of print).
April 18,
1996 The New York Review of Books
