The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky

Author:Robert Zaretsky [Zaretsky, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General, BIO009000 Biography & Autobiography / Philosophers, PHI016000 Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern, PHI022000 Philosophy / Religious
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Finding Roots

You know what I am? I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist.

Donald Trump

Without history there can be no sense of patriotism. We have only to look at the United States to see what it is to have a people deprived of the time-dimension.

Simone Weil

Stout was not among the many things Weil loved about England. When asked about the dark beer by her parents, she explained that she could not drink a glass without eating something with it. Yet there was no food to be had in a pub, where one normally drinks such brews. But there was something else to be had in pubs—namely, an introduction to the English character. “Did I ever tell you,” Weil wrote, “that a pub and a bistro, side by side, would show more eloquently than many big volumes the difference between the two peoples—their history, their temperament, and the way the social question presents itself for each of them?”1

Pubs, Weil observes, are divided by a partition that runs from the counter to the back wall. On one side is the “public bar,” furnished with a couple of benches and a dartboard. Standing in groups, beer in hand, the patrons busily converse; they are, Weil notes, “very happy.” This is not the case, however, on the other side of the partition, called the “saloon.” The same drinks are served there, but it is furnished with small tables and chairs. The patrons on this side of the partition seem better off, Weil thought, but they also “seem less happy.” There is, Weil thought, “a symbol here.”2

Apart from noting that the denizens of the public bar “have a great deal of dignity,” Weil does not explain what, exactly, the pub symbolizes. Perhaps it was because by June 1943, when she wrote this letter, she no longer had the strength or attention to develop her observation. By then, Weil had been a patient at Middlesex Hospital for a month, admitted when a colleague, surprised not to see Weil at her desk, passed by her rented room and found her unconscious on the floor. When the hospital staff diagnosed tuberculosis, they faced an odd complication: although there was food (if not stout) to be had, Weil refused to eat. As she had earlier warned Maurice Schumann, “I cannot eat the bread of the English without taking part in their war effort.”3

Especially if that bread was served in a glass. Even before her collapse, Weil rarely visited pubs. She makes little mention of them elsewhere in her letters, and during the four short months she lived in London, she spent most of her time either at the Free French offices at Hill Street or in her rented room in Holland Park. When she did walk around London, Weil preferred Hyde Park and its public speakers, a scene that reminded her of the agora in ancient Athens, to the public houses.4

But the symbolic attraction of the pub, at least for Weil, is not difficult to grasp. Like the ingredients

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.