Simone Weil

Simone Weil, an Anthology

dyonisos.

If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all. Perfection is impersonal. Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.

Manual labour. Time entering into the body. Through work man turns himself into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist. Work is like a death. 

We have to pass through death. We have to be killed — to endure the weight of the world. When the universe is weighing upon the back of a human creature, what is there to be surprised at if it hurts him? 

Work is like a death if it is without an incentive. We have to act, renouncing the fruits of action. 

To work – if we are worn out it means that we are becoming submissive to time as matter is. Thought is forced to pass from one instant to the next without laying hold of the past or the future. That is what it means to obey. 

Simone Weil, an Anthology

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