I have recently begun reading Simone Weil. I learned about her through reading Czeslaw Milosz, who loved her. She was quite a woman... anyway, I am going to post now and then some of my favorite of the paragraphs. I'm posting them without commentary... I have a hope that it will get a conversation going in the comments.
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The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer onto things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
As soon as we know that something is real, we can no longer be attached to it.
Attachment is no more nor less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist. A great many people do not feel with their whole soul that there is all the difference in the world between the destruction of a town and their own irremediable exile from the town.
The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. If we can let our whole good rest with something hidden in the ground, why not with God?
But when God has become as full of significance as the treasure is for the miser, we have to tell ourselves insistently that he does not exist. We must experience the fact that we love him, even if he does not exist.
It is he who, through the operation of the dark night, withdraws himself from us in order not to be loved as the treasure is by the miser.
To lose someone: We suffer because the departed, the absent, has become something imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary. We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of the desire which is not imaginary.
Hunger: we imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real: we have to fasten onto the hunger. The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward it is his way of appearing.
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2 comments:
Is a GA Tech grad allowed to comment on such things?
Does she ever write about the direction of the attachment? Put another way, does she write of the notion that something real (by her terms) could be attached to you without your reciprocal attachment? It seems possible that one could know something is real and actually become part of - not merely attached to - that something.
There! I did it! I commented on a work of literature!
All 5 of us miss ya, Ginny.
We at "a raid on the inarticulate" accept comments from graduates of all institutions of higher learning, as well as high school graduates, non-graduates, parents of precocious children, and hobos.
I haven't yet seen her write directly about attachment in the other direction, but I think that idea works with what she's saying. A big part of the idea of detachment, as she thinks about it, is loving something for what it is, without needing to possess it or cling to it.
As I see it (and this is a little departure from her writings, but I like to think she'd agree with me), it is good to stop clinging to things we think are good, so that what is really good, and goodly real, may cling to us.
I miss all 5 of you too. I have a picture of three beautiful girls on my refrigerator, and it makes me happy every time I walk by.
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