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Philosophical Haiku

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

by Terence Green

Strip away the Self
Discover the Eternal
Truth, Beauty, the Good

Simone Weil was born in Paris into a secular Jewish family. She died in Kent a Christian Platonist. She was, for André Gide, the ‘patron saint of outsiders’; for Leon Trotsky, the ‘melancholy revolutionary’; and for Albert Camus, the ‘ only great spirit of our time’. She was a Marxist manqué and a mystic de malheur (affliction).

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