Simone Weil
Simone Weil was born to Jewish parents in Paris, 1909. Her education was strict and refined. She studied at the Ecole Normale and taught philosophy in various high schools. Her decision to make her ideas explicit through her way of life, make it difficult to give a succint account of her life.
An extreme, revolutionary left wing militant, in 1934, driven by an overpowering need for firsthand knowledge of the dreadful conditions endured by workers, she interrupted her career and studies to work as a labourer in a Paris factory: an experience that was both trying and stirring.
Coming down with pleurisy, she was forced to leave the factory and embarked on a crucial period of reassessment. In 1936 she partecipated as a Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, joining the anarchic Durruti Column. She also worked in the kitchens, but after a serious burn to her foot, was forced to return to France. In 1937 she had a mystic experience which transformed into an intense faith.
Excluded from teaching by the race laws of the Vichy regime, she worked as a farm labourer until 1942, when she travelled to the USA, living amongst the poor in Harlem . Drawn back to Europe by the fight against totalitarianism, she contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943 in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England. She was just 34 years old.
Inside the frame of this story, the constant, persevering and almost stubborn search for the truth runs like a red thread.
Simone Weil is an extremely significant person because of the meaningfulness and radicalism with which she embodied of the world. She clearly was not understood as a philosopher. More interest was shown in her personality, seen by many as eccentric and original, and for her personal experiences as opposed to he thoughts.
Kitchen Film srl Via Nuova delle Fornaci, 20, Roma, Tel. 066386055 Fax. 066381506 - P.IVA 04581771005 - C.F. 05628730011
