"The wisdom of Plato is not a philosophy, a search for God by means of human reason; Plato’s wisdom is nothing but an orientation of the soul toward grace.” -- La Source Grecque
Grahame Davies has just published a new novel about Simone Weil . . .
A marvelous new novel about the dramatic life of Simone Weil has just been released. The novel is called, 'Everything Must Change' by Dr. Grahame Davies. Grahame Davies is a brilliant young Welsh writer who has won awards for his poetry at the Guardian Hay Festival at Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in prior years.
Grahame Davies' new novel about Simone Weil juxtaposes two stories: first, the religious and philosophical development of Weil, and her struggle against the Nazis during World War II; and the other story is a post-modern, post-national romance about the life of Welsh nationalist and her personal Bildungsroman, as a metaphor for the evolution of the trans-Devolutionary Welsh nation.
Read more about Welsh novelist Grahame Davies here.
I have not been able to put Grahame Davies' book down, since I started it last week! 'Everything Must Change' by Grahame Davies is a great summer read!Louis Dupré of Yale University if among prominent philosophers who have considered the 'Christian Platonism' of Simone Weil.
Louis Dupré is the T. L. Riggs Professor in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University. He has authored The Other Dimension, Transcendent Selfhood and A Dubious Heritage and co-edited Light from Light; Anthology of Christian Mysticism. His most recent books are Passage to Modernity: An essay in Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture and Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection.Sontag said of Simone Weil:
"Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense)."
"Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist's, like Kierkegaard's—was Simone Weil's. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis."
"No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies."
The most prestigious and respected scholarly source on the philosophy and life of Simone Weil is the American Weil Society, which holds conferences and symposia:The purpose of the American Weil Society is to promote scholarly discussion of the thought of Simone Weil, issues important for understanding her thought and issues on which her thought bears, and to promote interest in her thought.
It also seeks to provide an organization by which those interested in Simone Weil may have access to each other and each other's work.
The Society is a member of the Conference of Philosophical Societies and its annual meetings are listed in the conference calendar of that organization.
Gyda bob hwyl i bawb, Mark
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© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods
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