The room is long and narrow like the table. When she sat behind it, the door was on her left. The door gives on to a corridor: opposite was her father’s consulting room. When she walked down the corridor towards the front door she would have passed the waiting room on her left. The sick, or those who feared they were sick, were immediately outside her door. She could have heard her father saying goodbye to each patient and greeting the next one: Bonjour Madame, sit down and tell me how you are …
I sat at her table and read a poem which had marked a turning point in her life. In her hieroglyphic handwriting she had copied out the poem in English and learnt it by heart. At moments when she was overcome by despair or the pain of a migraine behind her eyes, she used to recite it out loud, like a prayer. On one such occasion, whilst reading it, she felt the physical presence of Christ and was astonished … Fifty years later, as I read the sonnet by George Herbert, the poem became a place, a dwelling. There was nobody in it. Inside it was shaped like a stone beehive. There are tombs and shelters like this in the Sahara. I have read many poems in my life but I had never before visited one. The words were the stones of a habitation which surrounded me.
In the street below, above the entrance to the apartment block (today you need to tap a code to get in), there is a plaque which reads: ‘Simone Weil, philosopher, lived here between 1926 and 1942’.
As we walk back to the car, Alice says that she still finds something very disturbing about the almost wilful act of her death.6 At the height of the war when so many millions had little choice about dying, the way that Weil embraced death seems bewilderingly wasteful. The voluntary extinguishing of a life and a remarkable mind that could have contributed so much after the war.fn3
*
We head south, out of Ashford, soon onto the straight roads through the marshes that lead to Dungeness and the late film director Derek Jarman’s old cottage – the last stop on our journey today. We wonder how much of Weil’s iconic status today is tied up with her early death. But surely, I say, more is to do with her profound understanding of empathy, her instinctive identification with the suffering of others? Coming even before her own pain. Isn’t that what resonates with our world today? Alice questions whether Weil’s empathy with others was really as profound as it seems to us now: perhaps her instinctive compassion for others was not as unique as we think? After all, isn’t this what most parents feel for their children as an almost automatic response? And we don’t consider this something remarkable. Although maybe we should. Because the fact that such love can then go further, into the wider world, opens up transformatory possibilities. I’m sure this is true, but I’m still intrigued by a tantalising quality in Weil’s life and thought that is difficult to put into words, and perhaps takes us beyond our use of the word ‘empathy’ – it’s her ability to connect in an intuitive way with people beyond her family and friends. People she had never met. The suffering of the stranger, the pain of those colonised by her country thousands of miles away. She felt these realities not in an abstract way, but as an entirely visceral lived experience.
Triggered by this thought, I start to tell Alice and Stefan about Casalis’ years with Speer in Spandau – and the compassion he showed, not only to a stranger but actually an enemy – and his entreaty to him ‘to open his mind and spirit to suffering’, and the transformatory impact this had on Speer. Perhaps part of my fascination with this lies in the Catholicism I was brought up with. It’s hard to talk about such things, especially since I rejected this religion a long time ago. I don’t find the words coming fluently, but I want to try to express something which, at root, may be a mystery. Signs to Lydd and New Romney ahead, we turn left to Dungeness. Perhaps it’s to do with becoming more secure in our own values as we get older, and then maybe it’s possible to see elements of real good, or even beauty, in something we have previously rejected. ‘The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’7 At this point we then can approach that belief, or that idea, as if never encountered before, and be startled by its force. Like walking by a river that you know, in a different season, and suddenly seeing a salmon leap.
The concept of sacrificing something in yourself for another human being. Or even sacrificing your own life for another. These concepts seem miraculous. Because they run against so much that our society now teaches, from the extreme materialism of twenty-first-century capitalism to biological notions of selfish genes. I wonder what happens in such moments of sacrifice, both in the receiver and the giver. Is this connected in some way with the word ‘redemption’? I’m surprised to hear myself using this word – a word used meaninglessly by priests decades ago to justify a fairy tale. But I feel like reclaiming it now, in humanist terms, and accepting that there is something redemptive in helping others beyond limits, beyond suffering.
We’re driving now towards a sky mackerelled with greys and pinks, the power station at Dungeness now visible on the horizon. What I’m attempting to describe, and what moves me about Weil and Casalis, has nothing to do with altruism, nothing to do with ‘saintliness’. I don’t have much time for either. I don’t accept those narratives. Actually, I’ve always found something repellent in the aura that attaches itself to supposedly ‘saintly’ people. The problem here lies in the self-consciousness of the seemingly good act. Whereas what I find compelling is the instinctive act of care for another, which could be called compassion. Yes, this is found between parents and children, between partners, between doctors and patients, yet it is even more extraordinary when it goes beyond the realm of family or professional relationships. Compassion for the stranger may be extremely rare, almost miraculous, as Weil puts it, but it does exist. And its existence breathes hope into the world.
Here Primo Levi again comes to mind. And particularly what he began to write when he returned to Italy after the war. He described the experience of starting ‘The Story of Ten Days’ as being ‘like a flood which has been dammed and suddenly rushes forth’. It forms the last chapter of If This Is a Man, and yet it was the piece which he wrote first. Reflecting on this chapter later in a letter to Charles Conreau, one of the men who had survived Buna-Monowitz with him, Levi wrote about ‘those ten incredibly intense days we lived together … our finest hour’.
Levi had finally reached his home in Turin on 19 October 1945, after a four-month odyssey across eastern Europe, and in January 1946 began working at DUCO (a paint and explosives factory, a subsidiary of Nobel-Montecatini), outside the city at Avigliana. Here, during the working week – because of limited transport in those post-war days and to save the costs of commuting between Turin and the factory – Levi was offered a room in the Casa Scapoli, a kind of workers’ hostel, which gave him a magnificent panorama over the Susa valley to the mountains beyond. For the first time in many years he had his own space, and a sense of safety. Yet inside he was consumed by what he had experienced, and the overwhelming need, like Odysseus, to tell his account of what had happened to him, and many others.
By February, we know that he’d started to record ‘pell-mell, thoughts and events, conversations, things heard and seen at the camp, on the back of train tickets, scraps of paper, flattened cigarette packets – anything he could find’. This frantic note-taking continued Levi’s personal exorcism, but it was all in preparation for something extraordinary. ‘Probably if I’d not written my book, I’d have remained one of the damned of the earth,’ he remarked later. He wrote feverishly in the Casa Scapoli throughout spring and summer 1946, typing late into the night, and sometimes even racing back in his half-hour lunch break to complete something. He hardly socialised at all during this period, all his energies that weren’t used up by his chemical work went into the developing book. By December the manuscript was completed. He wrote to a friend, the survivor Jean Samuel, ‘I’ve worked on this book with love and rage.’