Thinking Simone Weil and the Poetics of Worldly Estrangements
A meditation on the world at the edges of faith and pain
I am reluctant to admit what I think to be true—that one must hold a certain disdain for the world in order to live in it. It is a fashionably stoic sentiment, melodramatic even, and I feel a self-righteousness when I make this impassioned declaration to a friend over the phone. But let us think it together—let us probe, together, the contours of our own lives, with its endless private anguish, and maybe, just maybe, we can agree in a way we have not agreed on politics, or equality, or freedom. Sometimes, I feel my own heart and its growing disinterests. I feel it against my ribcage, its wet, clampy flesh—tough muscle, quivering with its hunger for life. In so many ways, it seems I too have grown cold to the world. And I think: Is this it, then? This surrender? Have I found my cross, my wilderness, the quiet persecution that will mark my life and afterlife?
About this time last year—give or take a month—I found myself in the middle of a health crisis whose details I don't yet feel inclined to share. And let me admit how convenient it is to offer health issues as an explanation for my silence these past months. Yes, it is true that I have been away all this time, but being away is also a part of being in the world. But a more reasonable truth is this: I was in so much pain most of 2024 that I, at times, could barely stand, or breathe, or think. There is no profit in pain. You cannot pray; you cannot call on God. He becomes a specter in that calcifying anguish. On good days—a mere consolation, like the thought of a childhood best friend or a long-abandoned ambition.
“We possess nothing in the world,” Simone Weil writes in her essay The Self.
“A mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I.’ This is what we have to give to God, in other words, to destroy.”
I do not always like Simone Weil, however evocative and compelling her words are. She has a predilection, like Moses, for scales of consequence of biblical end-times proportions. What does it mean, for instance, to have the power to say I and then to take that power and give it to God—to destroy it? Are we nothing but dead in the hand of the creator?
Weil’s sentiment is a difficult one, but then she adds:
“Nothing in the world can rob us of the power to say ‘I,’ nothing except extreme affliction.”
Ah, finally, I think. This I can understand—the way suffering recreates us in its image. The way it plunders the ego, contests, and challenges our prized liberties. Weil seems to suggest that we either willingly destroy the self, or the self is destroyed by affliction. We can submit our hedonistic and restless pursuits for a chance at sanctification, where sanctification is another word for separation, for estrangement. But then I wonder—what about joy? What about the happiness we are told, in quiet assurances and bright proclamations, is meant to be ours?
What I mean to say is that loving the world is a minefield for grief and disaster. It is the pursuit of our desires that entangles us with failed hope and disappointment. But the world itself does not mean life or people—it means a system of unstructured affections, shifting and unmoored, and for which I have found myself trying to let go. You see, I have been, in the last few days, and in the last few weeks, and in the last few months, trying to lay down my own affections, to sell all that I have and follow the teacher, as it were. But I am no young, rich ruler, and I don’t have much to lay aside—except my comfort, my pride, my stubborn entitlement that faith must fashion for me an outcome insulated from suffering and pain- The good life without stain or spot.
The other day, I was in a staff meeting with fellow graduate instructors. We were going around in a circle, extracting anecdotes from our classrooms, sharing what is working and what is not—ideas for teaching, for structuring lessons, for mapping student feedback. That sort of mind-boggling, boring detail that informs group meetings. I could feel the boredom settle on me, my neck and shoulders stiffening from the need to escape. I could almost see myself out of my body, my pride too errant now to find its way back to sedate compliance. I do not always love the world, but what I mean is that I do not always love my place in the world, or the people of the world.
I am teaching my students the Bhagavad Gita and its call to detachment, the idea that we must embrace duty but remain unattached to its outcome. There is a discipline to this, a refusal to be swayed by the fickle tides of success or failure, the idea that we must lose or destroy our obsession for controlled outcomes. And yet, as far as philosophical authority goes, I find myself drawn elsewhere—to John, to James, to their stark, uncompromising pronouncements. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. A contradiction, of course when set against the declaration that God so loved the world that He sent His only Son to die for it. Then there is the pragmatism in the letter to the Romans, Be not conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, the insistence is not on rejection for rejection’s sake, but on a recalibration of allegiance, a refusal for simple acceptances, easy resolutions.
What I mean to say, as I always mean to say these things is that maybe loving God does not mean we abandon the world, or we abandon the I, but that we learn to belong to it differently, the world—to move through it with a certain estrangement, a certain vigilance, knowing all the while that we were never meant to be at home here.
Either way, I like the terms estrangement and vigilance as umbrella phrases for what suffering can teach us. Pain, maybe, can help us to see new ways of being in faith, of being in God, of living in grace—even new ways of enacting mercy. I have learned with my own fervent spiritual convictions, that there is a faith that calms the storm, and a faith that survives the shipwreck. Our relationship to the outcome of things is not one of obsession but of vision and imagination. We believe so that we become, though we cannot always tell how we will become.
I draw a little comfort from Weil, and some from James and John. But the greatest consolation, for me, is in the words of Christ:
“In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”