Simone Weil

French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Born in Paris to a comfortable Jewish family, she was a prodigy — admitted to the École Normale Supérieure ahead of Simone de Beauvoir, who finished second to her. She taught philosophy in provincial lycées and took her summers off to work in factories on the Renault assembly line so she would know firsthand what industrial labor does to a soul. She fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War, on the anarchist side, but was sent home after a kitchen accident. In her late twenties she had three encounters she described as mystical — the last while reciting George Herbert's poem *Love* in a small church at Solesmes — that turned her toward Christianity. She refused to be baptized, however, insisting she belonged with those outside the Church. She wrote constantly: notebooks, essays, letters to a Dominican priest about why she could not convert. In London during the war, working for the Free French, she ate only the rations given to occupied France in solidarity with her countrymen. She died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in August 1943, at thirty-four. Most of her writing was published posthumously, edited by Albert Camus and others. Core teaching: attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. To pay full attention to another person — to see them as they are, without grabbing or fixing — is almost the same thing as prayer. Key works: *Gravity and Grace*, *Waiting for God*, *The Need for Roots*, *The Iliad, or the Poem of Force*, her *Notebooks*.