Simone Weil

My family doctor, whose care I have been under since 1973, has gone from the youngest partner in his clinic to the oldest. When their lease came up last year, the responsibility of a new lease fell on him. Rather than renew (he is in his 70s), he accepted an offer from London Drugs to move the clinic into one of its new stores.

At my doctor's old location, the pharmacist was across the hall and was usually ready to fill my prescription the moment I walked in the door. Despite a staff of ten, the London Drugs pharmacy requires a half-hour wait. With little else to do, I am free to roam the aisles and buy stuff.

Not this time.

A block west of my doctor's new location is Tanglewood Books, a quiet, narrowish, high-ceilinged shop with enough darkness, dust and mustiness to turn minutes into seconds. While true that the books are more expensive than at Pulp Fiction or Carson, that's to be expected, given that Tanglewood is on the city's west side.

I went into the shop thinking I would read a few pages in the Travel section, then return to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription. But halfway down the aisle (Travel is at the rear) I noticed a biography of Simone Weil.

Although familiar with Weil, I have not read much of her writing -- not compared to those I know who were born in the early 1980s, some of whom cling to her words like Tess to her tattered shawl. Curious, I pulled the book from its shelf, opened it at random and started reading.

"'Alain' was the pen name of Émile Chartier, a philosopher and prolific author who is now published in four volumes of the Pléiade (an edition limited to masters of world literature) and who fifty years after his death is still known to most lycée students in France. A gruff, plainspoken Norman who flaunted his working-class origins and shuffled about the classroom with a limp caused by a World War I injury, Alain was defiant of most forms of bourgeois sensibility: Once, when his classroom was visited by a government inspector, he went on, undaunted, instructing his students on their humanitarian obligation to prostitutes. Alain refused all ear-marks of literary celebrity and shunned almost every kind of traditional comfort. He even declined marriage, stating that domesticity might diminish the energy of his writing, and only in his eighties agreed to marry the woman who had shared his life for forty years." (22)

According to biographer Francine Du Pressix Gray, Chartier was Weil's "master teacher" during her four years at the Lycée Henri IV. Flipping backwards, I sought out Weil's name and read forward.

"... Simone's cross-dressing, and her need to disfigure herself into a caricature of the beautiful girl she could have been, were related to far darker, more tragic aspects of her personality: the despair caused by her general sense of unworthiness, her sense that she was plain and somehow incomplete and could not be loved as a woman, her deep unease about gender issues." (20)

"... Simone began to suffer the acute migraines that would plague her for most of her life." (17)

"... the first of many health-weakening obligations she would impose on herself throughout her life." (16)

"... Simone's character was her almost pathological receptiveness to the suffering of others, and her strong tendency to cultivate her own." (15)

That last line clinched it.

I lay the book before the clerk, when I noticed the cover had tears in it. "Do you have a piece of tape?" I asked, pointing out the tears running from the cover's die-cut frame.

Without a word the clerk removed from a drawer a roll of 2" box-making tape, tore off a piece and patted it twice over the tears. The tears were in check, but now it was the tape's wrinkles that stood out. "Hmm, didn't do a very good job of it, did I?"

"No," I said trying to smooth out one wrinkle, while he did his best on the other.