The Quality of Modern Life

...Most intellectuals would like to turn their backs on this central fact of modern life-that the people who create the products of wealth find both the work they do and the wealth they create totally empty and unsatisfying...

...If a child is doing a sum," she wrote in her essay "Human Personality," "and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality...

...The voluptuous, uncontrollable use of the pronoun "we" is the giveaway...

...nevertheless, in this particular regard, he has a symbolic importance...

...It would be hard to set the exact date, but that heady sensation intellectuals have recently acquired of moving masses, forming opinion, throwing the weight of their ideas into the shaky public balance, can most likely be associated with the advent of the television era...

...Indeed, deprive some of these critics of that one word and they would be struck dumb on the spot...

...Indeed, all of modern existence, as one can well see, is rapidly becoming an extension of the factory's "icy pandemonium.' The usual argument against Simone Weil's evaluation of the quality of modern life is round-about and basely ad hominem...

...My guess is that this failure can be attributed almost entirely to Simone Weil's contempt for and execration of power in all of its forms...

...and not only physical but mental solitude...

...But power for what...

...on the contrary, they were the heart of her thought, containing perhaps the most profound exploration on the part of a modern of the relations between the soul and the body...

...At the same time the person needs warmth, lest it be driven by distress to submerge itself in the collective...

...In Europe, however, the impact of her ideas has been pervasive and fructifying...

...Impersonality is reached by the practice of a form of attention which is rare in itself and impossible except in solitude...

...I prefer Norman Mailer to his acolytes, and I detect more of the artist, naive and vulnerable, in his behavior than in that of those who abet him...

...Since she is, in my view, one of the most radical, creative and inspiring analysts of modern experience, her "failure" here is both disheartening and instructive...

...life itself affords them quite enough...

...if anything, that "we" is the threatening, peremptory voice of fashion and collective brutality...

...And it is not, as might seem, a rhetorical device suggested by modesty...

...What I suffered then," she wrote, "has affected me so much that, even now, if any one, whoever he may be, in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I still cannot help feeling that there must be a mistake somewhere, and that the mistake, unfortunately, will be quickly rectified...

...When did "our" reigning group of intellectuals suddenly learn, with an inspiriting sense of rejuvenation, that power resided at the point of their tongues and pens...

...She ardently believed that her central insights into man and society could be health-giving and redemptive...

...Today there is a vogue for a literature of suffering and despair...

...This is never achieved by a man who thinks of himself as a member of a collectivity, as part of something which says 'We.' A group of human beings cannot even add two and two...

...This means, on the one hand, that for every person there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one's time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence...

...If this is the good, then modern societies, even democratic ones, seem to go as far as it is possible to go in the direction of evil...

...Simone Weil has not had a great influence in America...

...and it is the commonest of crimes, at all times, at all places...

...I have quoted this passage at length not only to underline my point about the we-saying intellectuals who clutter the scene at the moment, but also to show how Simone Weil's writings have that marvelous ability, found in only the greatest thinkers, to reflect the whole of her work in each of its parts...

...And the modern factory, which constantly degrades labor, is in her eyes a sacrilege of life...

...His open yearning for power undoubtedly reflects the ambitions of a whole mob of up-andcoming literati...

...Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery...

...It is the intellectuals who should form the leaven in the dough of modern misery, who must give meaning to this general misery by exploring their own to the end...

...It was, after all, as a worker in the Renault factory that Simone Weil was introduced to the experience of affliction which was to become her obsessive theme and concern...

...Her fate was her own...

...Perfection is impersonal...

...Simone Weil's testimony is precious, for it performs the intellectual's true task: it brings analytical consciousness and love to bear on situations in which ordinarily only power rules...

...Her thought is harsh, tragic, uncompromising, systematic...

...If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter it at all...

...If one reads these opinion-mongers with any attention, it becomes clear that power is identified almost solely with their lonely careers...

...It is obvious from this passage that Simone Weil, like Pascal and Bergson, has that deceptive French grace of seeming pellucid at the same time that her thought is incredibly complicated...

...What man needs is silence and warmth...

...In particular, a modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror...

...Yet many of the very same critics who find inspiration in these writers are appalled and revolted by Simone Weil's creative experience of affliction...

...Yet the despair that runs like a plague through the fabric of modern life-talk to the teachers in the colleges, and you will learn that the best and most intelligent young people are indifferent, benumbed, cynical...

...but the fate of the world around her, which she saw at one of its most crucial periods, demanded that she speak out...

...The implication of their argument seems to be that ordinary human beings, bereft of college degrees or sensitivity, can easily bear what Simone Weil found unbearable...

...Reviewed by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL Contributor, "Commentary" Richard Rees has done a fine job of collecting and translating all those political and social articles which Simone Weil published in various small magazines during her lifetime...

...Idolatry is the name of the error which attributes a sacred character to the collectivity...

...It is absurd and vulgar to confuse her personal history, about which we really know very little, with her social and political analysis...

...what he is given is icy pandemonium...

...As she says somewhere in this very book, the ordinary people, the people who work in the factories and farms, do not require an added experience of misery and affliction...

...There is such a thing as a genius for suffering-all of the greatest literature and art convinces one of thisand Simone Weil's special genuis was to show that private suffering can have a vital public, social value...

...In Italy alone I know of at least three brilliant social studies and a number of novels-one novel, Memoriale by Paolo Volponi, an unquestioned masterpiece-which could not have come into existence if Simone Weil had not lived and written...

...Genet, Beckett and their imitators are highly prized...

...Whoever mitigates or glosses over this fact is not merely an apologist for the misery, he is also a supporter of the very inhuman system which he often pretends to attack...

...talk to any factory manager and he will tell you the same story about his best young workers-would seem to prove that Simone Weil's experience of misery is far from unique...

...One begins to wonder whether their concern with shipwreck and desolation, when it demands nothing of them spiritually, when it becomes just another show, like the TV shows and movies that make current misery so apparent and so debilitating, is not simply a form of cant, a group emblem, a fashionable lip-service...

...At this moment only two of her books are in print and a large part of her work, perhaps the most interesting part, has not even been translated into English...

...As a result of these experiences, Simone Weil came to the firm conviction that "the relations between the collectivity and the person should be arranged with the sole purpose of removing whatever is detrimental to the growth and mysterious germination of the impersonal element in the soul...

...But unlike so many other obscurities and complications, hers are worth the trouble of solving...

...It is interesting to note that it was precisely these political and social articles which, if her personal diaries and notes had been lost, would have represented her thought in its published-that is, authorized-form...

...And Simone Weil herself has said that it was this contact with misery which destroyed her youth and stamped her forever "with the brand of serfdom...

...As Hannah Arendt has pointed out in her great book, The Human Condition, the diary which Simone Weil kept while working in the Renault factory is "the only book in the huge literature on the labor question which deals with the problem without prejudice and sentimentality...

...Her critics say that Simone Weil, a sensitive, overintellectual, neurotic girl, had no business in the first place going to work in the Renault plant, or volunteering for service with the Spanish Republican Army during the Civil War, or toiling as a farm laborer in the south of France...

...Precisely the opposite...

...Simone Weil, however, considered them private, in somewhat the way that Kafka thought of his fictiona matter, so to speak, between herself and God...

...This is not to say that her private, religious meditations were less important...

...She regards physical labor as the chief way open to man to make contact "with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of this universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order in it...

...And yet, in matters of real thought, as Simone Weil has so justly observed, the intellectual who uses such terminology should be both feared and distrusted...