The Simone Weil reader

She grew up in Paris and was accepted to the Ecole Normale at the age of seventeen, scoring first in the extrance exam to Simone de Beauvior's second. Three years later, Weil passed her exams "brilliantly" and became a teacher.

She threw herself into a spirtiual and political life with such zeal that some have since referred to her as "Saint Simone". She was always writing down her thoughts and as Sir Richard Rees wrote in his introduction to First and Last Notebooks "Taken all all together, the notebooks provide an unselfconscious and unintentional self-portrait of one of the most remarkable monds and characters of this century."

Weil lived it the middle of a world in physical and spiritual upheaval. This became her prime concern and she wrote, "The conditions of modern life destroy the mind-body equilibrium in everything, in thought and in action--in all actions: in work, in fighting...and in love which is now a luxurious sensation and a game....In its aspect, the civiliation we live in overwhelms the human body. Mind and body have become strangers to one another. Contact has been lost."

She confromted the rootlessness of modern life and the death of the spirit in an age of materialism. Her vision was radical, her writing visionary. Today, sixty years after her death, her work has, perhaps, an even greater immediacy and relevance.