Start with Waiting for God
It collects letters and essays she left with a priest, Father Perrin, and it's the most coherent single volume she has. It includes her account of why she wouldn't be baptised despite believing, and the essay on school studies and attention that has outlived everything else she wrote.
Gravity and Grace (1947) is more famous and more fragmentary. Gustave Thibon compiled it from notebooks she left with him, arranging her aphorisms under headings of his choosing. It's extraordinary and it's someone else's arrangement of her thinking.
| Book | Published | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Waiting for God | 1950 | Letters and essays left with Fr Perrin. The best first book. |
| Gravity and Grace | 1947 | Notebook aphorisms compiled by Thibon. Famous, fragmentary, other-arranged. |
| The Need for Roots | 1949 | Written for the Free French on what post-war France would owe its people. Her most political. |
| Oppression and Liberty | 1955 | The earlier political and industrial writing. Marx, factories, power. |
| The Iliad, or the Poem of Force | 1940 | An essay. One of the great pieces of criticism in any language. |
| First and Last Notebooks | 1970 | The raw material. For readers already committed. |
Attention is the idea to take away
Her most useful concept, and the least mystical. Attention, for Weil, is not concentration or effort. It's the suspension of your own thought, holding yourself empty and available to whatever is actually in front of you, rather than annexing it to what you already think.
She develops it in the essay on school studies, where she argues that the point of doing geometry problems isn't geometry. It's that struggling with something difficult builds the capacity for attention, and attention is what makes love of a neighbour possible. Her line is that the ability to ask someone what they are going through, and to actually want the answer, is rare and is what attention is for.
The life, which she made deliberately hard
Born 1909 in Paris to a comfortable, secular Jewish family. Brilliant enough to place ahead of Beauvoir in the entrance examinations. Taught philosophy, then took a year off to work on factory assembly lines because she thought she couldn't write about labour without doing it. It wrecked her health.
Went to Spain in 1936 with an anarchist unit, and was invalided out after stepping into a pot of boiling oil. In wartime London, working for the Free French, she reportedly limited her food to what she believed people in occupied France were receiving. She died in Kent in 1943 of tuberculosis and self-starvation, aged 34. The inquest called it suicide, which her friends disputed and biographers still argue about.
Around her
Camus, who called her the only great spirit of our times, arranged the posthumous publication of much of this work; see Camus. Arendt is the obvious contemporary comparison.
365 Days of Philosophy covers her within the twentieth-century sequence, one page a morning.
Common questions
Which Simone Weil book should I read first?
Waiting for God (1950). It's the most coherent single volume, containing the letters to Father Perrin and the essay on attention. Gravity and Grace is more famous but was arranged by someone else from her notebooks.
Did Simone Weil publish books in her lifetime?
Almost nothing. She died in 1943 at 34, and essentially every book with her name on it was compiled posthumously from notebooks, letters and essays.
What did Simone Weil mean by attention?
Not concentration or effort, but the suspension of your own thought so you're available to what's actually there. She thought it was what made genuine love of a neighbour possible.
Why did Simone Weil refuse baptism?
She believed, and thought God wanted her to remain outside the church, among those it excluded. She explains it at length in the letters collected in Waiting for God.
How did Simone Weil die?
Of tuberculosis and self-starvation in Kent in 1943, aged 34, having restricted her food to what she believed people in occupied France received. The inquest recorded suicide; her friends disputed it.