Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say 'I'. --Simone Weil, "Human Personality"

We are only able to conceive clearly transformations which can be repeated in the opposite direction, and yet we are in bondage to a time whose flow is irreversible. We grow old and die, ashes do not turn back into wood, rust does not become iron, and in general although many things can be easily and quickly destroyed it is either an impossible or else a difficult and lengthy task to reconstruct or replace them. The attempt to explain a world of this kind as a world of atoms subject to nothing but mechanical energy, which in no way involves irreversibility, ought to have been impossible.

Simone Weil, “Reflections on Quantum Theory” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, 60

Schon gut für Leo, dass er sich bei seinem Fast-Unfall ja auch zum Wagen umgedreht hat, und Betty aufm Beifahrersitz eigentlich genug sieht, aber niemand den Fußgänger wiedererkennt.

Bambou by Weil, 1940.

Whatever Else Is Left

Here's a little snippet! Putting it below the cut since there's some bad language.

Callum slumped into his driver’s seat and let his head fall against back of the headrest. He stared blankly out the windshield for a moment.

“Fuck,” he whispered angrily, a tight bubble of heat rising to his chest. The curse did little to cool it. “Fuck!” he said again, hitting his steering wheel. A pause. Then, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he hit it repetitively while he yelled, “fuck fuck FUCK—”

On his last hit, his car horn blared, causing some students walking by to jump and look strangely at him. “Shitshitshit,” he panicked, waving apologetically at them. He rolled down his window to say it was an accident, but it got stuck an inch down. Of course, he thought, trying the button a few more times but it didn’t budge. He craned his neck up toward the opening, hoping they’d hear him. “Sorry!” he said, “That was an accident!”

One waved as they walked by, smiling worriedly at him in response. The others tossed judgmental glances and moved on. He clicked the window button to roll it up but that didn’t work either. “Are you serious?” he groaned, his cheek falling against the hot glass. He could already feel the summer heat trickling into his car.

I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were gravity and grace raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead. Analogous desires—very frequent in human beings. When in this state, I have several times succumbed to the temptation at least to say words which cause pain. Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. Thus we corrupt the function of language, which is to express the relationship between things.

Gravity and Grace S. Weil

Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade...Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness. When we become tired, attention is scarcely possible any more, unless we have already had a good deal of practice. It is better to stop working altogether, to seek some relaxation, and then a little later to return to the task; we have to press on and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out. Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: 'I have worked well!'

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, pg. 110-111

INSPIRATIONAL

hey i just posted a rophne fanfic on ao3, if you read it i would really appreciate it because i'm new to that platform and it's kind of scary. Also the ocean's 8 fandom and the rophne shippers are incredibly dead. but there was nothing to lose by trying.

It sucks a bit, but I really wanted to post it.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

--Simone Weil, “To Accept the Void”

A change of scale must inevitably have a disrupting effect in physics, on account of the role played by the notion of the negligible. This notion is passed over rapidly, as if repressed out of embarrassment, when general statements are made in physics. Not only do physicists neglect the negligible, as they out to do by definition, but they are also inclined to neglect, even when they are making use of it, the very notion of the negligible--which is in fact, very precisely, the very essential thing in physics. The negligible is nothing other than what has to be neglected in order to construct physics; it is not by any means what is of no importance, because what is neglected is always an infinite error. What is neglected is always as large as the world, exactly as large, because the physicist neglects the whole difference between something that happens in front of his eyes and a perfectly closed, perfectly definite system which he conceives in his mind and represents on paper by symbols and signs; and this difference is the world itself, the world which presses around every morsel of matter, and filters into it, and inserts infinite variety between two points no matter how close they fit together, the world which makes any closed system absolutely impossible. The world is neglected because it has to be; and, since mathematics cannot be applied to phenomena at a lesser price, it is applied at the price of an infinite error.

Simone Weil, “Classical Science and After” On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, 32

chats of an introvert #1

“Ja, ich kann auch erst so in ner Stunde. Muss noch duschen und was essen und nicht zur Bar gehen und so.”