DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil author Arthur Wills translator Thomas R Nevin editor Gustave Thibon editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Nov '97

Should be back in stock very soon

Gravity and Grace cover

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist, and religious mystic, was little known when she died young in 1943. Four years later the philosopher-farmer Gustave Thibon compiled La pesanteur et la grâce from the notebooks she left in his keeping. In 1952 this English translation accelerated the fame and influence of Simone Weil. The striking aphorisms in Gravity and Grace reflect the religious philosophy of Weil’s last years. Written at the onset of World War II, when her health was deteriorating and her left-wing social activism was giving way to spiritual introspection, this masterwork makes clear why critics have called Simone Weil “a great soul who might have become a saint” and “the Outsider as saint, in an age of alienation.”

“A book of Pascalian pensees, touching on many phases of the intellectual and spiritual worlds. Written in prose which is as unadorned as a geometry theorem, it bears clear personal traces of the young genius who was half icy intellectual, half mystic.”—New York Times
“In these private reflections, at once pregnant and precise, and all springing out of painful depths of experience, mental pride is transmuted into spiritual insight.”—Manchester Guardian

ISBN: 9780803298002

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 272g

250 pages