weil is here for one year and one word. the year is 1934–35. the word is attention.
at 25 she was a philosophy graduate of the école normale, a lycée teacher, a labour activist. she took unpaid leave and went to work on the assembly lines at alstom and later renault as an ordinary unskilled hand — piece-rate pay, no special treatment, a factory journal kept after every shift. she wanted to know from inside what industrial work does to a person.
what she reports isn't mainly physical. it's an erosion of the interior. exhaustion, headaches, and a numbness that by the end of a shift made reading or thinking almost impossible — the sense of herself as a thinking person wearing thin. she wrote afterwards that the year had marked her in a lasting way. and it gave her a concept she was careful to distinguish from ordinary suffering: malheur, affliction — pain that takes hold of the body, drags you down socially, and leaves a mark on the soul so deep you start to feel, wrongly, that you deserved it. 'like a red-hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths.' if your drought came from repetition — the same day, the same line, the same nothing — she's describing it.
against affliction she set attention. not effort. she thought most of what passes for concentration is willpower straining, and that real attention is the opposite — 'suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object'. and she made it moral: 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity' (a letter to joë bousquet, april 1942, quoted in pétrement's biography), and 'the capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle'. the way back from being emptied, in her account, isn't filling up. it's learning to attend.
her last years: mystical experiences from 1938 that turned her toward christianity without ever joining the church (she chose to stay at the threshold, with everyone outside); war work for the free french in london; tuberculosis in 1943, and a refusal to eat more than people in occupied france were rationed. she died in a sanatorium in ashford, kent, on 24 august 1943, at 34. the coroner recorded suicide by refusing food; her biographer simone pétrement disputed it, citing staff letters saying she'd asked for food near the end and her lungs prevented it. both are stated here as what they are. her death is not a model of anything and this page doesn't treat it as one. all quotes are translations (emma craufurd; raymond rosenthal for the biography).