some droughts arrive with a loss. others get worn in — the same day repeated until the person doing it thins out. simone weil went looking for the second kind on purpose, and what she found is one of the more honest accounts we have of being ground down, and of what she thought the way back was.
in december 1934 she was 25, a graduate of the école normale supérieure, a philosophy teacher at a lycée, and already known for turning up at picket lines. she took a year's unpaid leave and went to work as an unskilled labourer — first at alstom, later on the line at renault — on piece-rate pay, with no one knowing who she was. she wanted to know from inside what industrial work does to a person, not from a book. she kept a journal after every shift.
what she reports isn't mostly physical, though the headaches and exhaustion were real. it's an erosion of the inside. by the end of a shift, reading was hard; thinking was hard; the sense of being a person who thinks at all was wearing thin. she'd gone in expecting solidarity with the workers and instead found the work itself doing something to her that solidarity couldn't answer. she wrote later that the year had marked her in a lasting way. she left in august 1935.
the word
out of that she made a distinction most people never make. there's suffering, and there's what she called malheur — usually translated affliction. affliction, in her account, isn't just pain. it takes hold of the body, drags you down in other people's eyes, and leaves a mark on the soul so deep that the sufferer starts to feel — wrongly, but inescapably — that they deserved it. "affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red-hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths." that's from waiting for god, letters she wrote in 1942, in translation.
if your emptiness came from repetition — the same commute, the same screen, the same nothing, until you can't remember what you used to care about — she's describing the mechanism. and she's naming the nastiest part: that it makes you feel it's your fault.
the answer
her answer was not effort. she thought most of what passes for concentration — the gritted teeth over the homework, the straining in prayer — isn't attention at all. real attention, she wrote, "consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object." waiting, not seizing. and then she made it a moral idea, the one she's most remembered for. in a letter to the poet joë bousquet in april 1942 (quoted in pétrement's biography): "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." and in waiting for god: "the capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle."
put the two halves together and you have her whole answer to numbness. being emptied by repetition is real and has a name. and the way back isn't refilling yourself by force. it's a quality of attention — to one thing, one person, one object in front of you — that is itself, she says, a kind of love.
the way back from being emptied isn't effort. it's attention — waiting, empty, given to one thing. she thought that was the closest thing to love a person can do.
the last years, plainly
from 1938 she had experiences she understood as christ's presence — one at the abbey of solesmes during holy week, with a splitting headache — and moved toward christianity without ever joining the church; she chose to stand at the door, she said, with everyone who was outside. in 1942 her family fled to the united states; she went to london to work for the free french. she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1943 and insisted on eating no more than people in occupied france were rationed. she died on 24 august 1943 in a sanatorium in ashford, kent, aged 34. the coroner recorded that she'd killed herself by refusing to eat while her mind was disturbed. her biographer, simone pétrement, disputed that, citing letters from sanatorium staff that she'd asked for food near the end and her lungs prevented her eating. both are set down here as what they are — a legal finding and a documented counter-argument — and neither is offered as the moral of anything.
the honest ledger
everything quoted is a translation (emma craufurd for waiting for god; raymond rosenthal for the pétrement biography). weil never converted and shouldn't be called a catholic. her self-denial — the factory year, the wartime rations — is described here, not recommended; her death is not a model and this article doesn't treat it as one.
for numbness, her question: what's one thing — a task, a person, a plant on the sill — you could give real, emptied attention to for ten minutes today, without trying to get anything back?