Book: Notebooks

Overview
Notebooks (1956) gathers Simone Weil’s private cahiers from her final years, presenting a working record of a mind testing ideas rather than a polished treatise. The pages move swiftly from metaphysical sketches and theological aphorisms to mathematical notes, spiritual exercises, and social reflections. Read together, they chart the genesis of the central Weil vocabulary, gravity and grace, attention, decreation, affliction, consent to necessity, later distilled in her better-known selections, while preserving the ferment, risk, and unguarded candor of their first formulation.

Form and setting
The entries are fragmentary and recursive, often no more than a sentence or two, sometimes extended inquiries. They include prayers, syllogisms, drafts, etymologies, and reading notes on Plato, the Gospels, classical poetry, and Eastern scriptures. Written amid wartime displacement in the early 1940s, the notebooks show an intellect seeking a method that is at once scientific in rigor and ascetical in demand, testing hypotheses against experience, attention, and suffering.

Gravity, grace, and decreation
Weil opposes “gravity” (the blind necessity governing matter, desire, pride, collective pressure) to “grace” (a supernatural descent that cannot be coerced). The spiritual task is not to overpower gravity but to consent to necessity without self-assertion, making space for grace. This consent is linked to decreation: the deliberate undoing of the self’s illusory centrality so that only God and reality remain in their truth. Creation itself is read as divine self-withdrawal; love imitates this by renouncing possession. The result is a paradoxical ethics of non-appropriation, where goodness acts by attention and restraint rather than by force.

Attention and the void
Attention is described as the purest form of prayer, an exacting, negative discipline that waits without grasping. The soul must endure the void, silence, absence, impotence, without filling it with idols of will or imagination. In that poverty, reality discloses itself. Beauty, especially of the impersonal order in geometry and nature, is a promise of the good because it compels without seizing; it educates attention by allowing consent without flattery.

Affliction, compassion, and impersonality
Weil distinguishes misfortune from affliction (malheur), a spiritual devastation that invades body, mind, and social standing. Affliction cannot be cured by slogans or benevolence; its only truthful response is attention that refuses to appropriate another’s suffering for the self. She envisions a radical impersonality in which justice is love of the order of the world and of the neighbor for their own sake, not as extensions of the ego or collective.

Reason, science, and analogy
The notebooks treat mathematics and physics as disciplines of the soul. Exact problem-solving trains attention and humility; necessity teaches obedience. Weil’s method relies on rigorous analogy: correspondences across orders of reality without confusion of levels. Contradictions are kept in view rather than forced into a system; truth resides where incompatible necessities touch, and the task is to consent to both without violence.

Scripture, Greece, and mediation
She moves freely between Plato’s Good, the Gospels, and classical epic. Greek clarity and Christian love converge in the figure of mediation: the distance that both separates and binds. Metaxu, bridges like beauty, friendship, and work, carry the soul across distance without erasing it. Christ’s cross becomes the supreme consent to necessity and abandonment, where love and order meet without domination.

Ethics and society
Notes on factory labor, oppression, and political idolatry press the same convictions into the social realm. Rights language is insufficient without obligations rooted in the good; parties deform truth by collective passion. True justice requires concrete attention to the vulnerable, structures that limit force, and forms of rootedness that honor the impersonal dignity of work.

Significance
Notebooks preserves Weil’s thought in motion: austere, hospitable to contradiction, and unsparing toward self-will. Its unity lies in a single demand, learn to look, so that gravity is endured without lying and grace may be received without theft.