Waiting for God

"Now we are into slightly strange territory. She worked for the Free French in London. Charles de Gaulle said she was mad, and it is an arguable point of view, it must be admitted. She died of anorexia and chain-smoking. I love her. I’m actually sort of in love with Simone. She was the most uncompromising human being who ever lived. It’s an extraordinary life story. They were a prosperous, middle class family in Paris, completely secular. She got a job, first of all working at a car factory. She never quite joined the party, but she was more or less a Communist. I wouldn’t drive a car she’d been assembling. She was a very short-sighted woman, utterly impractical. She then got a job as a supply teacher. She was completely committed. All the people who were taught by her failed their exams because she said things like, ‘I know I’m meant to be teaching you Greek , but I want to teach you about the real spirit of Homer.’ They never concentrated on the stuff they were meant to be learning, the boring stuff. Then came the dreaded war. Even before the war, the French were rounding up the Jews. They practically had labels round their necks before the Nazis invaded. She got a letter from the local authorities, that she wouldn’t be wanted for the next academic year. She wrote back saying, ‘I don’t know why you shouldn’t want me.’ The answer was probably that she was a terribly bad teacher — but she said, ‘I wonder if you think I’ve got a Jewish surname.’ She then goes into one of her, to my mind immensely lovable, to other people very, very annoying tirades, saying, ‘I don’t quite know if you realise that the Emperor Titus went into Jerusalem and more or less obliterated the people who could have been described as Jews. I grew up in a completely secular way. As far as I know, I have absolutely no connection with any of the people who were murdered by the Emperor Titus, and I’m not sure I even believe that the people who say they are Jews have any connections with ancient Jews.’ A lot of Jews hate her for that because she doesn’t believe in the continuity of it. They think of her as a self-hating Jew. I don’t think she was at all. She was very brave as well as foolish. She then went to Marseille, where she had this mystical experience. There are various other moments: she became convinced that she’d been spoken to directly by Christ. Then she wrote these extraordinary things, none of which, except for the one called The Need for Roots , saw print in her lifetime. They were all published after she died. They were all put into print, even her notebook. You get the hang of it from the title – that Homer, in particular, anticipates Christ. Beautiful. Simone would never accept baptism. The real reason, I think, is that she was suffering with the Jews — even though she said she wasn’t a Jew. When she was in London, she went to mass at the Jesuit church every day, but she would never accept baptism. She claimed it was because Homer hadn’t been baptised. What I love about her is that I think if one—I haven’t got there—were able to take Christianity completely seriously, as St Augustine did and she did, you would realise it was a terrifying, burning fire kind of thing which will consume your whole soul. It did consume her whole soul and burnt her up. I know that she was also probably suffering from all sorts of mental illness. In all three cases they had direct experience of Christ. Completely heartfelt. Her way of praying was to say Herbert’s ‘Love Bade Me Welcome’ and then the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. She was passionately keen on Greek and believed that Jesus spoke Greek. She believed the Lord’s Prayer in Greek is what he delivered to the world. I think that’s unlikely, but I love Simone for thinking it was Greek and for thinking that Homer was an early Christian."

"You’ve put that in an awfully interesting way. Do you want to expound? I think I know what you mean, but it’s not how I thought of her. I went to her cemetery, the Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford, Kent. There’s a little tombstone for her and it’s nothing special. It’s the way she would have wanted it. One prevailing theory about how Simone Weil died is that she starved herself to death, that she suffered from anorexia throughout her life, and that that is what killed her. Others say it was the tuberculosis that she contracted that killed her. I’m not too hung up on that. Throughout her life she had what I would call extreme empathy for sufferers. When she was young and World War I had broken out, she refused to eat sugar because the French troops at the front didn’t have sugar. She slept on unheated, hard floors. She had what some might call a masochistic streak or others would look at as just a very, very empathetic tendency. She probably also had some psychological issues that explain so much of anorexia. “I think we’re all born philosophers, but we have it beaten out of us as we grow older” She grew up in a hyper intellectual, very secularized Jewish family in France. She had an older brother whose shadow she spent most of her childhood in, André Weil, who went on to be one of the great mathematicians of 20th century Europe. As someone who also grew up in a hyper intellectual, very secular Jewish family I can relate to her but, you know, she was reading Blaise Pascal by the time she was 10 and speaking Assyro-Babylonian—which she called a ridiculously easy language—and Sanskrit. She bested Simone de Beauvoir on the exams to get into the elite French universities. So she was really learned and highly intellectual, but it was not her head, but her heart that interested me. It’s an anthology of her writing called Waiting for God . It is the most accessible of her anthologies. It’s a slim book and it is, I think, the best of her writing, the most accessible of her writing, in particular what she writes about patience and about waiting, which are twin themes that run throughout her philosophy. Yes, it’s the essay with an unwieldy title “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” I don’t know what it is about philosophers and titles, but they have a tendency to give their books just terrible titles. The World as Will and Representation – don’t get me started on that terrible title. But in this awkwardly titled—and if you’re not a religious person you might find it off-putting—essay; I’m looking at my copy now and it’s just highlighted and underscored everywhere, because it’s really not about school studies and it’s not about God, it’s about paying attention, but in a very different way than the way most of us conceive of it. Yes. When we think of paying attention, we think it is synonymous with concentration. So if I were to say, ‘Nigel, I want you to pay attention to what I’m saying’ you’ll probably just instinctively furrow your brow, you might tense up your jaw, you would contract, in a way, and think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to pay attention, I wasn’t paying attention.’ She thought this sort of concentration is ridiculous, that when you tense your body like that, when you tense your mind like that, when you narrow your focus to that pinpoint prick of whatever it is, you are not paying attention the way she envisions, which is a more expansive way of being, where you’re relaxed and you’re receptive. It’s a kind of active passivity, which sounds like a contradiction, but philosophers are known for making contradictory statements like that. You are alert and you are receptive to what might enter into your mind, but you have no expectations of what that might be and you’ve enlarged yourself. You’ve not shrunk yourself. She says it better than I can: “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive, in its naked truth, the object that is to penetrate it.” Too often, she says, “thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active, we have wanted to carry out a search.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This blew me away because it’s the opposite to the way I’ve lived my life. I’ve wanted to be active. I’ve been seeking all my life. What she’s suggesting is a kind of radical, active passivity where you are not seeking but waiting. It’s called “Waiting for God,” but you could call it ‘Waiting for the Truth. You could just call it ‘Waiting’. I would have preferred the title simply ‘Waiting’, which is really what it’s about. Her spiritual religious life gets very complicated, we don’t have time to get into it, but she had Catholic leanings. She never became a Catholic, she was not baptized. It’s complicated, but I think of her as a spiritual more than a religious figure, and a philosopher by any account. I am pretty good at titles. You’re speaking of confirmation bias, as psychologists call it? Absolutely, and this is why we get stuck. I write about it a bit in the Thoreau chapter, about seeing and the different theories of seeing and how we see. We tend to think of vision as like a photograph, your eyes are taking a photograph of me. In fact, you’re not. It’s more like a conversation that you’re having with your brain. Like I see a person and I think it’s Eric and this gets us through probably 90 per cent of the day and totally fucks us over for the other 10 per cent. Seriously. I agree. I would condense that to the following: we only see what we expect to see. Otherwise, we literally do not see it. We only see what we’ve seen before in a large way, which is why, I think, all innovation has to be incremental—because if you take too big of a leap and you were to invent a theory or a device that had no connection to what people had seen or experienced before, they’d be like, ‘I don’t know what do with it.’ I’ve given that a lot of thought."