Still yet more Simone Weil hagiography—a florilection.

Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.

Still more poignant—so painful is the contrast—is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.

Far from hot baths was he indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. (4)

By some trick of my neurology, anaphora reduces me to quivering emotional jelly. (Case in point, a completely banal and uninteresting poem of Edna Millay's, "The Bobolink," is the only work of art ever to reduce me to tears—and, if you can believe it, does so reliably, as if by witchcraft. The culprit? The mindnumbing, kitschy refrain "I shall never be sad again, / I shall never be sad again.") But never mind. Another:

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert. (10)

Weil's pithiness is a world wonder—the whole essay is like this. Weil notes something true about the Iliad which had never before occurred to me:

The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. (15)

This Weil identifies as the moral core of the epic, fundamentally Greek and fundamentally un-Roman and un-Hebrew:

Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great; they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity, purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization; once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained of this spirit but pale reflections. (35)

She explains:

Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot. The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted them and they retained their superior position just as long as they obeyed Him. Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves, were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no tragedies. In Rome gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews, misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes—this is a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable. ... Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify. (35-36)

This is of course historically nonsensical (bless G-d, the Byzantines!), but as thought in harness? Majestic. She understands the Iliad better—or rather I'm more willing to receive that angelic mind of hers—when she turns from the execration of the Jews:

But the auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans. (19)

Or here:

At the outset, at the embarkation, their hearts are light, as hearts always are if you have a large force on your side and nothing but space to oppose you. Their weapons are in their hands; the enemy is absent. Unless your spirit has been conquered in advance by the reputation of the enemy, you always feel yourself to be much stronger than anybody who is not there. (20-21)

This is such a simple observation—indeed so obvious in retrospect. Perhaps it only amazes me because I'm young—but then, so was Weil, who died at 32 of well-invited consumption.

Thus war effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? (22)

Can you imagine what a postmodern essayist would be doing with this material? I grieve for my civilization. The reason—and this next quote is very famous, I've seen it several times in reading on Heroides 3—is almost certainly that Weil is a monotheist whereas our contemporary idealists are something less than heathen:

The wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter—all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero. A monotonous desolation would result were it not for those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem, those brief, celestial moments in which man possesses his soul. (27, emphasis mine)

I feel I may be starting to abuse fair use, so I will close after a last quotation:

The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience—the destruction of a city. (31)

Of a city! Well, let me leave off singing silent praise and make a close of it. Weil is discussed in half of a short and interesting book review at Poetry magazine, well worth reading. On an unrelated note, my lady wife has vanished for days in order, as it turns out, to produce this charming blog post. Only I seem to realize how deeply nostalgic for Limburg he really is, poor soul, stranded (baruch HaShem) at the capital of our crumbling empire. Well, I've heard these anecdotes a number of times, but you too might take some pleasure in hearing about the angulus terrarum he loves so unconsciously and so well.