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A review by casparb
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
A few years ago I read the Second Noble truth of Buddhism - Desire is the root of suffering (trans. vary) - somewhere and loved it. I wrote it down and put it up on my wall and repeated it to myself wandering about. It was necessary. Some time later I realised I'd entirely misconstrued it. Whereas the Buddhist intention here (as I inexpertly understand it now) is to divest oneself of desire, of 'clinging' to worldly delights, I'd naturally approached it through what I'm inclined to call a more Christian lens. I'd seen this as an affirmation, a yawp, an I-AM. That every suffering seemed grounded in this so-human ability to desire! This was beautiful. That's not to say I approached suffering teleologically - that it was in aid of something larger or that the matrices of desire were amounting to the paradisial. But in this complete mistake I'd found an affirmation that seemed to produce - as the Russians do so well v. Dostoevsky - the entwinement of desire/suffering. A British woman I met once told me a few years after marrying her Russian husband he turned to her, surprised, saying: "I don't know why you expected marriage to be happiness" - now we find that depressing. They were what I suppose in English we'd call 'happily' married but there's a Russian sensibility of entwinement: suffering-joy-desire-abasement. This isn't depression so much as observation. It gestures to equilibrium.
One of the aspects of Simone Weil I find interesting is that she seems to knit together my awful misreading of the Second noble truth with something more like the received reading. I don't find it classically Christian either but who ever found SW that. There's a sublimity to I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.(p.80). This rides that edge - I'd begun to find myself interested in loving it but probably, in the teenage egoistic sense because it was useful. I'll conjecture, again ignorantly, that Buddhism finds suffering useful in identifying desire as clinging, attachment, but the ontology of it is for Buddhism has a significance there which is miles beyond what I'm remotely capable of discussing. But it slides into a clearing, a void.
...endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
She's inimitable.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
One of the aspects of Simone Weil I find interesting is that she seems to knit together my awful misreading of the Second noble truth with something more like the received reading. I don't find it classically Christian either but who ever found SW that. There's a sublimity to I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.(p.80). This rides that edge - I'd begun to find myself interested in loving it but probably, in the teenage egoistic sense because it was useful. I'll conjecture, again ignorantly, that Buddhism finds suffering useful in identifying desire as clinging, attachment, but the ontology of it is for Buddhism has a significance there which is miles beyond what I'm remotely capable of discussing. But it slides into a clearing, a void.
...endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
She's inimitable.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.