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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2009
Five weeks before her death in August 1943 Simone Weil wrote a letter from London to her parents in New York in which she briefly discussed the attitude of her contemporaries to her work. Replying to a remark in a letter from her mother, she wrote:
Darling M., you think I have something to give. That is badly expressed. But I too have a sort of growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.
It's a dense mass. What gets added to it is of a piece with the rest. As the mass grows it becomes more and more dense. I can't parcel it out into little pieces.
It would require an effort to come to terms with it. And making an effort is so tiring!
Some people feel vaguely that there is something there. But they content themselves with uttering a few eulogistic epithets about my intelligence and that completely satisfies their conscience. Then they listen to me or read me with the same fleeting attention they give everything else, taking each little fragment of an idea as it comes along and making a definitive mental decision: ‘I agree with this’, ‘I don't agree with that’, ‘this is brilliant’, ‘that is completely mad’ (that last antithesis comes from my boss). […]
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