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Simone Weil on the Paradox ofFriendship and Separationby Maria Popova

“It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have madeourselves clear to ourselves.”

Friendship is one of life’s greatest graces, and

yet we hardly understand the gossamer threads

of sympathy and love by which it binds us

together. C.S. Lewis likened it to philosophy,

art, and the universe itself in that “it has no

survival value; rather it is one of those things

which give value to survival.” Aristotle saw it

as a mirror we hold up to one another. For

Emerson, it was the product of truth and

tenderness. John O’Donohue found its essence

in the ancient Celtic notion of anam cara. For

David Whyte, it is “a mirror to presence and a

testament to forgiveness.”

One of the most profound meditations on

friendship comes from French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–

August 24, 1943), a woman of immense insight on such complexities as how to

make use of our suffering and what it takes to be a complete human being.

8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/simone­weil­friendship­separation/ 2/8

In the indispensable Gravity and Grace (public library) — which also gave us Weil

on attention as a form of prayer — she writes:

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have madeourselves clear to ourselves.

[…]

To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be agratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We mustrefuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of theorder of grace. It is one of those things which are added untous. Every dream of friendship deserves to be shattered…Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to bedesired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

[…]

Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more thanthe beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracleconsists simply in the fact that it exists.

In keeping with this Zen-like notion, Weil argues that the sympathetic

communion of friendship is a complement, not a counterpoint, to our essential

capacity for solitude:

Keep your solitude… When you are given true affection therewill be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship,quite the reverse.

8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

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But Weil’s most striking stance of friendship bridged the philosophical with the

practical — the very survival of her ideas is the direct product of friendship.

In June of 1941, when the antisemitic laws of the Nazi administration barred her

from teaching philosophy at the University, Weil decided to work on a farm in

the country for the same reason she had labored incognito at a car factory some

years earlier — to better understand the human experience and its most trying

dimensions. A friend of Weil’s introduced her to a farmer named Gustave

Thibon, six years her senior, who she hoped would take her on as a worker.

(“Farm work is one of the best jobs for getting to know people as they really are,”

young Sylvia Plath wrote just a few years later.)

Gustave Thibon

In the introduction to Gravity and Grace, Thibon — who eventually became a

philosopher himself and lived to be ninety-seven, outliving Weil by nearly six

decades — recounts his initial skepticism:

I am a little suspicious of graduates in philosophy, and so forintellectuals who want to return to the land, I am well enoughacquainted with them to know that, with a few rare

8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/simone­weil­friendship­separation/ 4/8

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7 THINGS I LEARNED IN 7 YEARS OF

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exceptions, they belong to that order of ranks whoseundertakings generally come to a bad end. My first impulsewas therefore to refuse.

Still, he relented and took a chance on this earnest young woman. The

relationship, Thibon writes, was “friendly but uncomfortable” at first and the

two “disagreed on practically everything.” But he soon came to see that Weil was

indeed one of those rare exceptions — her combination of sincerity, goodwill,

and genius won him over and the two developed a deep friendship that outlasted

Weil’s weeks on the farm.

In 1942, as the Nazi occupation drove Weil out of her homeland and she

reluctantly headed to New York, Thibon met her at the train station. She handed

him a giant portfolio of her papers with the instruction of taking care of them

during her exile. And so he did, binding them with the thread of friendship into

a lasting volume of ideas that continue to ennoble and illuminate long after

Weil’s untimely death — Thibon curated her writings for posterity, in the truest

sense of the word, which has its roots in the Latin cura, “to care for.”

In a letter to Thibon, included in his book Simone Weil as We Knew Her, Weil

writes from America:

The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation … weshould welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, andexperience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all thesweetness or bitterness as the case may be. Meeting andseparation are two forms of friendship that contain the samegood, in the one case through pleasure and in the otherthrough sorrow… Soon there will be distance between us.Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship,for those who do not love each other are not separated.

In the introduction to Gravity and Grace, Thibon shares another 1942 letter

from Weil, which further speaks to her idealism about friendship:

Dear Friend,

It seems as though the time has now really come for us tosay goodbye to each other… Human existence is so fragile athing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love withouttrembling.

[…]

I also like to think that after the slight shock of separationyou will not feel any sorrow … and that if you shouldsometimes happen to think of me you will do so as onethinks of a book one read in childhood. I do not want ever tooccupy a different place from that in the hearts of those Ilove, because then I can be sure of never causing them anyunhappiness.

A few months later, Weil left for England, where she died on August 24, 1943,

at the age of only thirty-four. Her ideas, collected in Gravity and Grace, endure

as the book one is always reading in childhood — that is, in the sincerest, truest,

most ennobled part of the psyche.

8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

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AN ANTIDOTE TO THE AGE OF ANXIETY:ALAN WATTS ON HAPPINESS AND HOW TOLIVE WITH PRESENCE

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8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/simone­weil­friendship­separation/ 6/8

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8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/simone­weil­friendship­separation/ 7/8

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8/25/2015 Simone Weil on the Paradox of Friendship and Separation | Brain Pickings

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/simone­weil­friendship­separation/ 8/8

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