Love in the Void, by Simone Weil

This Book is For:

*People who want to be inspired by the example of a brilliant woman who possessed the moral courage to live in accordance with her most deeply held convictions, no matter the price.

*Anyone who is interested in the philosophy of love and aesthetics, and who wants to renew their appreciation of the beauty that surrounds us all.

*Individuals who want to learn how to become better and more attentive listeners, and learn how to bring the moral virtues exemplified by Simone Weil into their actual lives.

*Everyone who is concerned about the direction of our global society, yet who doesn't despair of finding solutions to our biggest problems.

Summary:

“If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor. Love sees what is invisible.”

-Simone Weil, Love in the Void

There are certain people who have lived on and inhabited this earth who make us want to be better than we are. Simone Weil is one of those people for me, and to exist in the same reality as her, to be able to draw inspiration from her life and thought, seems to me to be a real blessing.

Weil was a 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic who wrote about love, beauty, and the obligations we have to make others' lives better with our loving presence, our sincere attention, and our genuine affection.

Once, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, Albert Camus, called Weil "the only great spirit of our time," and a second Nobel Prize winner, André Gide, said that she was "the most truly spiritual writer of this century." Popes and presidents and philosophers the world over have said pretty much the same thing, and yet, tragically, the wider world seems to have nearly forgotten her.

My breakdown of Love in the Void seeks to correct this cosmic imbalance by reintroducing her life and work to you, reader, and it's very possible that both of us will be changed by the effort.

That's not to say she isn't without her detractors.

Even I, who owe so much of my thinking and worldview to her ideas, don't agree with everything she's ever done or said. Far from it. Another great writer, Susan Sontag, criticized Weil's fanatical asceticism and her "noble and ridiculous political gestures," and I'm with Sontag on that one.

As I discuss in the View from the Opposition section below, I believe she went too far with some of her moral commitments. For example, do you know how she died?

In solidarity with the French citizens living under Nazi occupation during World War II, she refused to eat any more food than the soldiers were allowed to have on the front, even though she had escaped to Britain by then and didn't have to live on the same strict rations as they did. It's rumored that she ate even less.

Weil ended up starving to death - dying of complications from malnutrition - and personally, I think that it was a fairly stupid, pointless way to die.

She could have done so much more good if she had lived, instead of sacrificing herself senselessly for her ideal.

But that's who she was: she cared so much, and she identified so strongly with the suffering of others, that it's almost like she couldn't have done otherwise.

She lived her convictions to the very end, and even Sontag confessed that she was "nourished" by Weil's "seriousness," and that "in the respect we pay to such lives...we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.”

It's also easy to misunderstand some of Simone Weil's ideas, which makes this book breakdown particularly difficult to write.

For one thing, some people are put off right away by the term "Christian mystic," and hey, I totally get it. The word "God" brings up totally different associations depending on who's reading it, and it's never my intention to "convert" anyone. Convert them to what, anyway?

So please, even though I know it's difficult, I'd like to ask you to read the word "God" without judgment. Weil's ideas are inseparable from her faith, yes, but they also apply to any and all human relationships, and there are lessons to be drawn from everyone.

This particular book, Love in the Void, draws from material Weil wrote for her books, Waiting for God, and Gravity and Grace. It deals with the practice and demands of true attentiveness (very important to her thought), the love of our neighbors and the beauty of the world, and different kinds of love and how they draw us beyond ourselves into the larger reality of the world (which, to her, would be God's reality).

As you might be able to tell from some of my other work, these ideas have been nothing less than transformational for me. I hope to do them just a little bit of justice here and transmit to you as much as I can of her luminous example.

I mean, the woman slept on the floor because she realized that some other people in the world weren't fortunate enough to sleep on a bed!

She took a physically demanding job at a car factory, simply to study the conditions of industrial work, and to experience what it was like to live under the worst conditions imaginable. And not just for like a week or anything, then going home to her luxury, saying, "Phew, glad I don't have to do that for the rest of my life."

No, she worked at that car factory for ten years. Here's what she had to say about her experience:

“As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it, for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue.”

She lived her beliefs to an extent that's basically unimaginable to most people today. She was also known for the extreme level of attention she would give to everyone she met, no matter who they were. After leaving her presence, people would remark that never before in their lives had they felt that someone had actually seen them as Simone Weil had.

Working in various factories, however, she had observed the employers' extreme indifference to the individual, and, as her physical health deteriorated, she came to several shocking epiphanies.

The first that I'd like to bring up is her belief that perhaps our individual rights are not nearly as important as the near-infinite degree of duty and obligation we have to one another.

I've read those words over and over again, and I still find that idea astounding. Maybe instead of focusing so much on what other people owe us, we could spend more time thinking about what we could give to others. It's like what Bruce Lee said:

"If everyone would help their neighbor, then there would be no one without help."

One of her other revelations concerned our powerlessness against death, and the limits of our intelligence and capabilities compared to the infinity of existence. Since we are all ultimately powerless against death, she thought, there is a certain point at which all we can do is wait and observe.

Her Christian faith taught that the "Good" comes to us, via God's grace, and that preparing ourselves to receive it is all we can do against the "void," or the emptiness of death and the selfish ego.

But hey, let's lighten this up a little bit, shall we?

In today's breakdown, the Key Ideas have to do with the "void," yes, but also with compassionate attention, infinite unconditional love, and the miraculous beauty of the world in which we live out our days and nights.

I don't believe that Simone Weil was a particularly "happy" woman, but by assimilating some of her better ideas into our daily lives and actions, we can be, and we can position ourselves to receive the Good, no matter what religious or spiritual beliefs we may hold.

Key Ideas:

#1: Beauty is Eternity Here Below

“No one is above or below beauty.”

Leave it to philosophers to try to "dissect" beauty and to describe it in words, eh? I do believe, however, that Simone Weil's contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics is vastly underappreciated.

What she had to say about the nature of beauty was...well...beautiful!

Weil believed that only the universe as a whole can rightly be called beautiful and that what we generally call "beautiful" are just pale imitations of this universal beauty. Which is kind of what Plato believed, come to think of it!

That's not to say that nothing on Earth can be called beautiful, but rather that everything can be, and that everyone can appreciate it and be a part of it. No one is above or below beauty, and the beauty of eternity is available to everyone on Earth with the senses and sensibility to perceive it.

There are two other points about beauty that she makes in this book that I want to quote here. I can't pick a favorite, but here's the first one:

“Only beauty is not the means to anything else.”

To her, beauty's "instrumental" value is always less than its intrinsic value. Beauty just is, and always will be, and there's nothing we need to "do" about it or with it that will make the world more or less beautiful. Everything that beauty can lead to - making something more valuable, people more desirable, etc. - is less important than the simple fact that beauty exists.

The second of the two quotes is this one right here:

“Physical work is a specific contact with the beauty of the world.”

Simone Weil was no stranger to hard, physical labor, and she had no illusions that the conditions of factory workers, farmers, and others were glamorous or even all that tolerable. She had compassion for - suffered with - factory workers for nearly her entire adult life.

But their (and her) experiences didn't negate the fact that physical communion with the real, actual world could be beautiful.

Personally, I've always felt powerfully connected to the world and to life itself through hard, physically demanding work.

Whether it's shaping and chiseling your physical self in the gym, planting trees, or building something real in the external world that didn't exist before - and wouldn't exist, if it weren't for you - we can all participate in the creation of beauty, and it's imperative to our healthy, psychological functioning that we do.

#2: The Afflicted are Not Seen

“Compassion and gratitude come down from God, and when they are exchanged in a glance, God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet."

Simone Weil was known for the quality of her attention, and for really being able to see those who traditionally went through life unseen by society at large. As she says, the easiest way to become invisible is to become poor, and so more often than not, it's the people who most need help who are also the most invisible.

However, she argues that there are both wrong ways and right ways to help "the afflicted," as she calls them.

Assistance without pity is what the poor and helpless - the afflicted - really need, not condescension. They don't need people to feel sorry for them or to degrade them; they simply need to be helped and lifted up by the rest of us.

The only difference between the poor and the rest of us, you might say, is that they don't have as much money! That's really it. Questions about being "deserving" of help, or whether poor people are lazier than the rest of us are beside the point.

The destitute and the downtrodden need to be seen and cared for - without our actions being tainted by pride or condescension. It's not we, who are "better" than them, deigning to offer them the crumbs from our table; helping people isn't just an opportunity to show everyone how good and how virtuous we are.

Rather, it's about extending unconditional love and support to everyone with whom we share this earth. Without judgment, without feelings of superiority, and without performing tedious, supercilious mental calculations of whether or not they "deserve" it.

Virtue, as Simone Weil defines it, consists in behaving exactly as though the giver and receiver were equal - like the universe was simply rearranging itself, with the recognition that the giver and the receiver are actually one. As Weil says herself:

“He who treats as equals those who are far below him in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings, of which fate had deprived them. As far as it is possible for a creature, he reproduces the original generosity of the Creator with regard to them. This is the most Christian of virtues.”

#3: The Void

“We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void with ourselves. If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe? We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full."

"The void" can mean many things to different people, but you can think of it like a feeling of emptiness or dissatisfaction with the way the world is; like a feeling of being lost in a vast and indifferent universe and seeing no clear path toward a fulfilling, connected life.

It's a kind of idleness of heart and mind, an emptying of the universe of all sources of meaning, purpose and happiness. It is...not a great place to be.

By "filling the void with ourselves" we substitue this lack of meaning and engagement with egoistic projects of self-advancement and self-aggrandizement that are meant to reassure us that our lives have value, but that generally collapse when those projects are ultimately revealed to be what they are: terribly empty.

The fact is that it's downright scary to be alive, and the tempation has always been to assuage that feeling by taking our frustrations out on someone else by lashing out, inflating ourselves with pride, and becoming cold and impassive - by stiffening ourselves against life and the people with whom we share the Earth.

Simone Weil wrote that by harming someone, we attempt to fill an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in someone else. Unconsciously, we think this will keep the void at bay, but in reality we simply create more of a void in ourselves.

Naturally, if there were an easy answer to all this, then someone as brilliant, patient, and wise as Simone Weil would have found it already.

Some will say that her embrace of the Christian faith was an evasion - a retreat into a secure answer by placing her faith in salvation from outside, or above - but it's also true that she always rejected organized religion and never formally joined the church itself. She never renounced her obligation to think for herself, even if the answer she ultimately came up with wouldn't be the same as what some other people would eventually settle on.

However, her thoughts and ideas cut across all religious boundaries and in fact say something important about human life itself. Her fundamental realization was that the void can never be filled by ourselves alone; if it's to be filled at all, it has to be filled with love...for and by others.

In fact, her most radical assertions had to do with this very idea of infinite, universal love. For example, to explain the existence of things that are “not God”, when God is supposed to be “everything”, Simone Weil suggests that God emptied himself completely, out of love for life and for His creation, in order to create everything that is outside of Him.

When I first read that...I think that was the moment when I knew that Simone Weil was an extremely special kind of thinker, a woman with an extraordinarily active, aware, penetrating mind, and someone worth listening to more closely.

When you do listen more closely, you see that what she's saying can apply in a more humanistic context as well. You don't have to believe in God - or even be religious - to understand and feel what she means by universal, unconditional love.

Take this final quote of hers, for example, and witness a manifestation of the kind of infinite, unconditional love that all human beings can aspire to bring into our interpersonal relationships:

“God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance."

Book Notes:

“Beauty is always a miracle.”

“To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”

"By accepting death and powerlessness, without denying the heart’s longing, we position ourselves to receive the Good.”

“The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil."

“Christ makes himself known not through dogma or obedience to religious authorities, but to those who follow the deepest desires of their hearts.”

“Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation. No apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down."

“We must give up everything that is not grace and not even desire grace.”

“When two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation."

More Quotes from Simone Weil:

"This is where faith belongs. May God give it to us daily. And I do not mean the faith which flees the world, but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us."

“God is longing to come down to those in affliction.”

“We only possess what we renounce.”

“Egoism, by definition, has its bounds; it cannot become transcendent.”

“Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment?"

“Punishment must be an honor. It must not only wipe out the stigma of the crime, but must be regarded as a supplementary form of education, compelling a higher devotion to the public good."

“Truth is one. Justice is one. There are an infinite variety of errors and injustices.”

Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, edited by Eric O. Springsted:

Simone Weil might actually be one of the greatest and most compassionate human beings who ever lived, and whenever I think of truth, goodness, beauty, or justice, I tend to think of her.

She taught me how to listen, how to really see other people, how to demand the most from myself, and how to give the most of myself. It's no wonder that Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

As I hope you’ll see from these Key Ideas and Book Notes, Simone Weil was a very special philosopher, a woman of unimpeachable intellectual honesty, and the possessor of the type of limitless compassion - and stubbornness - that could have only ended with her death.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“Justice consists in standing guard so that evil is not done to human beings.”

“There is not, there cannot be any other relation between a human and God except love. What is not love has no relation to God.”

“Listening to someone is to put ourselves in his place while he is speaking. Putting ourselves in the place of a being whose soul is mutilated by affliction, or who is in imminent danger of becoming such a being, is to annihilate one's own soul. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Thus the afflicted are not heard.”

Read the Full Breakdown: Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, edited by Eric O. Springsted

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag:

Are we changed by the images we're constantly exposed to during the day? Especially where images of violence, suffering, and misery are concerned, are we moved to action? Inspired to help? Informed? Depressed? Do they teach us, or numb us?

These are the questions that the brilliant essayist Susan Sontag asks us to consider for ourselves in this book-length essay that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was her last published book before her death in 2004.

Regarding the Pain of Others is concerned mainly with photography, especially war photography. One of its aims is to answer Virginia Woolf's question from her book, Three Guineas, "How, in your opinion, are we to prevent war?"

Sontag wastes no words in examining what it means to care about what we see, and whether, eventually, we become anesthetized by the images we see so often, no matter what their graphic nature or the extremely unsettling moral claims they make on our attention and our actions.

Where it gets really interesting is when she focuses specifically on famous photos from history that have later been found to have been staged.

If a corpse or a bloody helmet is moved to a more "photogenic" location, does it have the same meaning as one that's more...candid? And can gruesome photos be artistic? Should they be?

What about framing - can't whatever the photographer leaves out change the whole meaning and reception of the image? If yes, isn't that also true of the caption? And what about the victims/subjects? Should they be named? What about privacy, dignity, and decency?

It's astounding how one photograph can lead us to ask so many uncomfortable - albeit fascinating - questions, and Sontag faces them all down with inimitable insight, compassion, and subdued, righteous anger.

To experience someone else's pain is probably too much to ask from photography; there's always going to be a sense of distance, an essential difference between "viewer" and "subject." But I think to remain unaffected - or even to believe that you can remain unaffected is a mistake.

In Adam Smith's lesser-known book, The Theory of Moral Senses, he places sympathy at the center of "social gravity," and Sontag makes a persuasive case in her book that once we lose our sympathy, we've taken a significant step toward losing our humanity.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

“To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.”

“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.

The photographs we are particularly dismayed to find out have been posed are those that appear to record intimate climaxes, above all, of love and death. The point of ‘The Death of a Republican Soldier’ is that it is a real moment, captured fortuitously; it loses all value should the falling soldier turn out to have been performing for Capa’s camera.”

Read the Full Breakdown: Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag

Discover the Immeasurable, by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When he was a young man, Krishnamurti was "discovered" by one of the leading members of the Theosophical Society and groomed to become a new World Teacher, someone who would guide the evolution of mankind through his teachings and lead humanity into a new era.

An organization was even founded to support this aim - The Order of the Star - but in August of 1929, Krishnamurti suddenly stepped down from his position and dissolved the entire organization. He did this after a short but epic speech titled, "Truth is a Pathless Land," where he asserted that no organization can ever lead a person to discover truth; there is no authority that can ever replace the need for an honest, searching inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality.

For the next 60 years, he traveled all over the world giving public talks and speaking with individuals about the vital importance of deep, personal meditation, and the radical transformation of the human psyche.

Discover the Immeasurable contains a series of six lectures given by J. Krishnamurti in the Fall of 1956, where he speaks about the inherently evil nature of authority, the constant flow of existence, and how the structure of our current society and even our own minds perpetuates needless conflict, misery, and tragedy.

We have created our society through our relationships with others and our habitual patterns of thinking, and if we want to change the world, it is impossible to leave ourselves unchanged.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

"I maintain that no organization can lead man to spirituality. If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth."

“The individual problem is the world problem. It is what we are as individuals that create society, society being the relationship between ourselves and others. I am speaking – and please believe it – as one individual to another, so that together we may understand the many problems that confront us.

I am not establishing myself as an authority to tell you what to do because I do not believe in authority in spiritual matters. All authority is evil, and all sense of authority must cease, especially if we would find out what is God, what is truth, whether there is something beyond the mere measure of the mind. That is why it is very important for the individual to understand himself.”

“There is no ‘good’ conditioning or ‘bad’ conditioning – there is only freedom from all conditioning.”

Read the Full Breakdown: Discover the Immeasurable, by Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Good Neighbor, by Maxwell King:

Children can sense when they're being devalued; they can sense when an adult truly and honestly cares for them and when they don't, and they can always, always spot a fraud.

Fred Rogers, or Mister Rogers to all of his television friends, was one of the most inspiring early childhood educators ever, and he brought his message of care, affection, and unconditional love to millions of children over the course of his 50-year career in broadcasting.

He was the real deal, and children could feel it.

The Good Neighbor is a biography of Fred Rogers, one with astonishing personal stories on nearly every page. Like the time when Oprah lost control of her own television show during a taping because every child in the audience was so powerfully drawn to Mister Rogers; or when the TV station held an event where children could come and meet Mister Rogers, and thousands of kids showed up, lining up for miles and blocking the street like it was a college football game or something.

However, no matter how long the line was, he would always, always get down on one knee, look each kid in the eye, and make sure they knew that they mattered. He took kids and their questions seriously, and he saw the best in them, which made it possible for them to bring out the best in themselves.

Sample Quotes from the Book:

“For Fred Rogers, it was always this way when he was with children, in person, or on his hugely influential program. Every weekday, this soft-spoken man talked directly into the camera to address his television ‘neighbors’ in the audience as he changed from his street clothes into his iconic cardigan and sneakers.

Children responded so powerfully, so completely, to Rogers that everything else in their world seemed to fall away as he sang, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’ Then his preschool-age fans knew that he was fully engaged as Mister Rogers, their adult friend who valued his viewers ‘just the way you are.’”

“Millions of his viewers grew up to be adults who hold on to those values and maintain a loyalty to Fred and his work. He exemplified a life lived by the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ found in some form in almost every religion and philosophy throughout history. His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.”

“He spoke to us as the people we were, not as the people others wished we were.”

Read the Full Breakdown: The Good Neighbor, by Maxwell King

The View from the Opposition:

No one's ideas are beyond questioning. In this section, I argue the case for the opposition and raise some points you might wish to evaluate for yourself while reading this book.

#1: The Good Deserves More Attention

As I never tire of pointing out (no pun intended), when racecar drivers are headed for a nasty crash into a wall, what they do is look away from the wall. What this does is reorient their attention from the impending disaster and towards where they want to go instead. This, I think, is a useful image to keep in mind when engaging with the work of Simone Weil.

When you look for what's wrong with the world, what is going horribly, then that's exactly what you're likely to find. But, crucially, it works the opposite way as well. If you look for the good - in both specific people and the world at large - you're likely to find that too.

So one of my general "criticisms" I guess you could say about Simone's work and thought is that she doesn't devote nearly enough attention to what's right with the world.

Now, against what I've just said, I also admire her steadfast refusal to look away from the people who needed her help.

She didn't have to sacrifice her health in the factories; she didn't have to starve to death; she didn't have to do a whole lot of the things she ended up doing in order to further identify with and assist the poor and the afflicted.

She chose not to look away, and she chose not to ignore what was happening.

For this, I admire her immensely, but I also feel as though she didn't allow herself to see enough of the good. I believe that we need to correct this general imbalance, and sometimes, when we're assaulted on all sides by news of the absolute worst that human beings everywhere are going through, we need to go out of our way to remember that beauty and health and happiness and life exist everywhere too, and that if we go out in search of it we're likely to find it.

#2: Starvation Was Not the Solution

As I explain in the Summary above, Simone Weil died from complications arising from malnutrition - she starved herself to death in solidarity with the French soldiers on the front during WWII that were only allowed strict rations while they fought off the Nazi aggressors.

It's my personal opinion that this was a rather stupid way to die, and that she could have done so much more good for the world had she allowed herself to live.

I don't deny that her death constitutes further evidence of her extreme devotion to her beliefs, but at the same time, with a mind like that, imagine what kind of contribution she could have made to human knowledge in general and to philosophy in particular!

On top of that, if she had survived for at least a few decades longer, she would have had a greater chance to be remembered today, instead of being relatively forgotten by history. Not necessarily for her sake, but for the sake of all the people who could have been profoundly changed by witnessing her example and engaging with her brilliant ideas.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking:

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:

You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.

Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...

#1: "How often to give your full, nonjudgmental, undivided attention to the person with whom you're speaking? Has anyone ever given you that kind of special attention? What did it feel like?"

#2: "What do you think your obligations are to the other people with whom we share the earth? Are they more important than any rights we may have? Equally important? Which do you tend to focus on the most?"

#3: "Are we powerless against death, or are we an intimate, integral part of the unfolding of the wider universe?"

#4: "What does 'grace' mean to you? Do you think that we are owed this divine grace; that we are naturally deserving of it; or can make ourselves worthy of it? How might we come to do that?"

#5: "Do you think that Simone Weil went too far in her commitment to her ideals? Do you think she could have done more good in the world had she taken care of herself better, and allowed herself to use her intelligence, love, and commitment in a different way?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

-Voltaire

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Participate in the Creation of Beauty

There's a lot of ugliness in the world, but you don't have to add to it.

You can choose to create something beautiful instead, and you'll make the world a far better place if you do. It doesn't have to be anything grand and ambitious - just try to make some tiny little space more beautiful than it was before, or make something yourself that wouldn't exist otherwise.

It should also be said that your actions themselves can be beautiful as well.

You don't have to write beautiful poems or become a violin virtuoso in order to participate in the creation of beauty. You can simply, in the words of Mother Teresa, go out in search of someone who believes they're all alone in the world and convince them that they're not.

#2: Listen to Someone, Completely and Fully

When Simone Weil was looking at you, she really “saw” you, and people noticed this. Her ability to do this positively impacted every single person she ever interacted with. So, at least once a day, practice really “seeing” people, and listening to every word, attentively, respectfully, even lovingly.

You'll likely have multiple opportunities to practice this each day, and you'll get better at it each time you do.

It's very simple to do, although definitely not easy: just give your whole attention to whomever you're speaking with. Not waiting for them to finish talking, or rehearsing what you're going to say when they're done flapping their giant gums; just waiting, patiently and respectfully, hearing what they're saying, and letting them know that you see them.

#3: Face the Void

Don't run away from the emptiness, and, whatever you do, do not try to fill it up with yourself. Those pathways are ultimately empty, and a life spent serving only yourself is barely a life at all.

Living is extremely uncertain, as you're probably aware! But what most people do is seek to compensate for their fear and anxiety by embarking on all these vain, ego-enhancing projects that only serve to create more emptiness in the end.

That being said, there is great strength and calmness in standing fast and staring back at the void. Sit with the feelings of uncertainty and the fear of being "nobody." Allow yourself to feel how scary it is to be alive, and recognize that other people also feel the same way.

Upon realizing that, now you know what it is that has a reasonable chance of filling up the void: expanding the love that you feel for everyone with whom you share the earth, and committing to helping each other face the void together.

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. The mathematician André Weil was her brother. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a laborer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class.

Love in the Void, by Simone Weil

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