"I among others"

Francine du Plessix Gray begins Chapter 6 of her biography of Simone Weil with an August 1935 letter Weil sent to a friend after Weil left her assembly-line job at the Renault factory: "Only the sea can wash away all this accumulated fatigue," writes Weil. A month later, while vacationing with her parents at a fishing village south of Porto (Portugal), Weil follows a Christian religious procession -- "the first in a series of events that were to transform her spiritual life," according to du Pressix Gray.

Weil, who was raised in a secular Jewish household, writes: "There the conviction suddenly came to me that Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, I among others." (103)

At the end of September, Weil resumes teaching, this time in Bourges.

du Pressix Gray writes:

"The twelve students in her class, who affectionately called her 'la petite Weil,' enjoyed teasing her by slipping right-wing periodicals into her desk drawer. She tried to sharpen their writing skills by asking them to describe humble everyday objects in terms of one single sensation, form, or colour (the winning essay in her class described an eraser)." (104)

An eraser!

In 1967, Francis Ponge published Savon (Soap, en anglais), his own description/interrogation of an everyday object. Not soap, per se, but the bar it comes in (and goes from?).

Ponge writes:

"There is so much to say about soap. Precisely everything that it tells about itself, until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me."