Words At The Very Best
This quotation from Simone Weil is worth passing on:
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and it remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve a combination of a greater number. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell. –Simone Weil 1909–1943
Of interest concerning Simone Weil: Weil was a precocious student, proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12. She later learned Sanskrit after reading the Bhagavad Gita. Like the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, her interests in other religions were universal and she attempted to understand each religious tradition as an expression of transcendent wisdom. She often became involved in political action out of sympathy with the working class. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers’ movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated workers’ rights. In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. Weil was born into a secular household and raised in “complete agnosticism”. As a teenager, she considered the existence of God for herself and decided nothing could be known either way. In her Spiritual Autobiography however, Weil records that she always had a Christian outlook, taking to heart from her earliest childhood the idea of loving one’s neighbour. Weil became attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, the first of three pivotal experiences for her being when she was moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns during an outdoor service that she stumbled across during a holiday to Portugal.
Some of Weil’s notable ideas: Decreation (renouncing the gift of free will as a form of acceptance of everything that is independent of one’s particular desires), needs of the soul, uprooting (enracinement), patriotism of compassion, abolition of political parties, the unjust character of affliction (malheur) –Wikipedia
