Simone Weil (February 3, 1909 - August 24, 1943), a Leftist, French intellectual of Jewish heritage, a converted Catholic who was denied official study and gave her life - literally - to the suffering of others, wrote lines so pure and clean you would swear they were etched in the design of the universe. “We possess nothing in the world- a mere chance can strip us of everything- except the power to say ‘I.’ 

With this clarity of being, this 'I-ness,' this self-emphatic proclamation, the young, physically fragile but soulfully strong Weil wrote her most personal thoughts in Gravity and Grace.

Thoughts on existence, our empirical selves borrowed from God, the expanse of eternity, and suffering as a means to knowledge. Thoughts that after Weil's death at age thirty-four were saved from forgottenness by Weil's close friend, French priest Gustave Thibon, who published them in 1947.     Weil's most personal writings, reverently and thoughtfully introduced by Thibon, influenced T. S. Eliot (who referred to her as a genius), Albert Camus (who acknowledged Weil in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech), and Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz whose friendship with Camus was solidified by their mutual adoration of Weil's writing.   
The work of Weil stands on its own and you might wonder why I mention these accolades. Partly because my words alone cannot do her work justice, but also because Weil so lacks of her self that without their comments, we might not see her at all.
 
From Thibon's Introduction:

I find it hard to make public the extraordinary work of Simone Weil... At first our relationship was friendly but uncomfortable. On the concrete plane we disagreed on practically everything. She went on arguing ad infinitum in an inexorably monotonous voice and I emerged from endless discussions literally worn out. ... Then, thanks to the privileges of a life which is shared, I gradually discovered that the side of her character which I found so impossible, far from revealing her real deep nature, showed only her exterior and social self; unlike most people she gained immeasurably in an atmosphere of close intimacy.   "Dialogue for me is not a form of polemics, of monologue or magisterial dogmatism, but of shared investigation" Thoughts from Jorge Luis Borges on the insatiable benefits of mutually-assured growth and personal development through dialogue. I think of Weil and Thibon arguing late into the night over pots of tea.

 Simone Weil.

Complex personality notwithstanding, the staggering force of Weil emanated from her insistence to live within the boundaries of her beliefs while simultaneously refining those boundaries. She resembled the ancient philosophers for whom philosophy was a way of life, not a dogmatic lecture.   Except our dear Seneca the Younger, a Roman senator and advisor who lived a life of tremendous wealth and means while extolling the virtues of modesty and "not wanting".

Like George Orwell who wrote the truth of poverty to draw attention to it, Weil chose to live among the working poor, worked as a farmhand (leaving farm-house accommodations to sleep in the barn), and ultimately died in 1943 due to malnutrition from eating only what French prisoners were allotted by their German captors.

Humility has its object to eliminate that which is imaginary in spiritual progress. There is no harm in thinking ourselves far less advanced than we are: the effect of the light is in no way decreased thereby, for its source is not in opinion. There is great harm in thinking ourselves more advanced, because then opinion has an effect.

Weil's forbearance against pain and suffering might have cost her life, but it also underscored the center tenant of her spiritual thinking - that we should never be asleep to suffering. "You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. when he was arrested for protesting the violation of civil rights, “But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations."

Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.

And when they had their 'fill of tears' (Iliad). - This is another way of making the worst suffering bearable. We must not weep so that we may not be comforted. All suffering that does not detach us is wasted suffering, nothing is more frightful, a desolate coldness, a warped soul.

"War (Krieg)," woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist who lived from 1867–1945 and worked in multiple mediums to express suffering. This harrowing print is part of Kollwitz' "Death" series, depicting the secondhand WWI victims. Learn more. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Thibon reiterates, "This insistence upon inner purity and authenticity made her pitiless for all the authors in whom she thought she could detect the slightest affectation, insincerity or self-importance... For her, the only thing that counted was a style stripped bare of all adornment, the perfect expression of the naked truth of the soul."   I recommend a barefaced read of Weil, then read the Introduction. As these were private notes, the writing lacks cohesion, lines are more like pristine droplets of primal thoughts rather than edited arguments. It also meanders, and it can be a bit abrasive in its emphasis. To that end Thibon warns us not to mistake her self-assuredness for arrogance. Weil was a-hypocritical and virtually saintly.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

When we are disappointed by a pleasure which we have been expecting and which comes, the disappointment is because we were expecting the future, and as soon as it is there it is present. We want the future to be there without easing to be the future. This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure.

Eternity, for Weil, is what we step into after relinquishing our empirical existence.   Eternity for others meant a state of being while alive, a mental capacity to elevate above temporal boundaries. Read more on what Mary Oliver called "keeping my mind on eternity" in my piece A Singular Focus on the Eternal.

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales on initiation. If I accept this gift it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside of himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization. Humility is the refusal to exist outside God. It is the queen of virtues.

If saintness existed for Weil, it came from her consistent refusal to live outside God's grace and, consequently, as a human being. A body that needs food, medicine, and even relationships. That void of self, a complete emptiness of need, something the Buddhists seek (but perhaps with less self-annihilation) drives most of Gravity and Grace. "The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God..." wrote Weil in a note of contempt.

How can we escape that which corresponds to gravity in ourselves? By grace alone. In order to come to us God passes through the infinite thickness of time and space, his grace changes nothing in the plan of those blind forces of necessity and chance which guide the world; it penetrates into our souls as a drop of water makes its way through geological strata without affecting their structure, and there it waits in silence until we consent to become God again.

[...]

All of the things that I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat; all the beings I meet - I deprive the sum total of all that of contact with God and I deprive God of contact with all that in so far as something in me says 'I'.

If our ability to say 'I' is genuinely all we possess   Weil does admit that this 'I-ness' can be foreshortened by extreme affliction, a discovery echoed by George Orwell during his time living amongst the poor and certainly by Eli Wiesel in Night. Both men write that a body reduced to hunger is a person no longer. Read more in The Absolute Annihilation of Hunger. (gravity) is the same ability we relinquish to God (grace).

Simone Weil's life was extremely short and extremely intense. We should be grateful she clasped that 'I-ness' long enough to write Gravity and Grace.