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Cynthia Wallace: Ve is so committed to us seeing and engaging with the world as it is. So this is why she's suspicious of our imaginations because she doesn't want us to distract ourselves from contemplating the void. She wants us to tell the truth about suffering. She wants us not to pass by a beaten and bloodied person on the side of the road and say, I don't have time to look at that right now.

Like she wants us. She wants to both see what is immensely beautiful here and what is enormously difficult here, and she thinks that both of those practices are necessary for the other. Simone Weil argues that suffering that can be ameliorated should be. So she argues that we should be structuring societies in a way that facilitate flourishing for all people.

And she was really concerned with factory workers in France. In a just radically dehumanizing labor system, she was concerned with colonized people at a time when most European thinkers were not criticizing colonization. So, it is really thinking about the people who are at the margins of our society.

Social Structures of Kind of Prestige and Privilege. She's saying in every case where we have the capacity to ameliorate suffering, we should be doing that. And then when you have these instances of suffering that are inescapable, then we need to find ways to make meaning of those and learn from them.

But that's never an excuse.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Roza with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

What are you going through? What a question, huh? What are you going through? It was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil's thought that pushed her beyond philosophy and mysticism and into action. Vey believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, what are you going through, particularly the afflicted other, and then truly listening to the response, prayerfully attending, that this would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.

Because Simone Vey believed that any suffering We're

in our second episode of a short series exploring how to read Simone Weil. She's the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, Waiting for God, among so much more essays, letters, notebooks, and a deep and lasting influence that continues today. In this series, we're exploring Simone Weil, the mystic, Simone Weil, the activist, Simone Weil, the existentialist.

And what we'll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life are deeply unified in her way of being and living and also dying. And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode, in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France.

And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me. Bye bye. Actually, she died in England in August 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942, when it was already under Nazi occupation, first to New York, then to London, so that she could work with the Free French Movement and be closer to her home.

And as I went back to fix this research, I began to realize. Just how important her place of death was, it's more than a trivial biographical detail. She died in a nursing home outside London, in Kent, Ashford, to be precise. She had become very sick with tuberculosis, and then in August 1943, she was moved to the Grosvenor Sanatorium.

The manner and location of her death matter because it's arguable that Her death by heart failure was not a self starving suicide, as the coroner reported, but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation, her biographer Richard Rees wrote.

Quote, as for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love. And going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick and I'll quote it at length because I believe it offers a very fitting entry into this week's episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.

Quoting now, Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide due to voluntary starvation, an action undertaken at least in part out of a wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under German occupation.

The willed deprivation of her last period was not new. Indeed, refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga, is that with them, the deprivations and rigors are undergone for the payoff, for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life.

Or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Weil, it was entirely the opposite. It was her wish, or her need, To undergo misery, affliction, and deprivation, because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest.

Thus, around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, and the were then the modern equivalent of, quote, slavery, and she survived in her own words as, quote, forever a slave.

What she went through at the factory, quoting Vey again, Marked me in so lasting a manner that still today, when any human being, whoever he may be and whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake. Her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, tells of meeting her when they were preparing for examinations to enter a prestigious private school, saying, quote, She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits.

A great famine had broken out in China. And I was told that when she had heard the news, she wept. I envied her for having a heart that could beat around the world. Hardwick ends this article by noting, quote, In London, her health vanished. Even though the great amount of writing she did right after the time she went to the hospital must have come from those energies of the dying we do not understand.

The energies of certain chosen dying ones, that is. Her behavior in the hospital, is unimaginable. Her refusal, and by now her inability to eat, vexed and bewildered the staff. Her sense of personal accountability to the world's suffering had reached farther.

Last week, we heard from Eric Springstead, one of the co founders of the American Vey Society and author of Simone Veil for the 21st Century. Next week, we'll explore Simone Veil the existentialist with philosopher Deborah Casewell, author of Monotheism and Existentialism, as well as co director of the Simone Veil Research Network in the UK.

But this week, we're looking at Simone Veil the activist, her perspectives on redemptive suffering, her longing for justice, and her lasting influence. Especially on feminist writers. With me is Cynthia Wallace, Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion.

This is unique because it's learning how to read Simone Weil from some of her closest readers. and those she influenced, including poets and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Annie Dillard. In this conversation, Cynthia reflects on the risky, self giving way of Simone Weil. Her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers, the very possibility of redemptive suffering, the morally complicated territory of self sacrificial care, and the way that that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities.

What it means to make room and practice hospitality for the afflicted other. The extent, meaning, and healing of hunger, the beauty of vulnerability, and that grounding question for Simone Weil's political ethics. What are you going through? Thanks for listening today.

Cynthia Wallace, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. 

Cynthia Wallace: Ah, thanks so much for having me. 

Evan Rosa: You've written a really interesting book about this enigmatic and mysterious figure to so many people, but a beloved and also sometimes complicated figure. I wonder if you could Start by just articulating what got you into Simone Weil and why you've taken her up as a project.

Cynthia Wallace: It's, it's a bit of a meandering story. I was in grad school at Loyola University, Chicago, like 15 years ago, I was reading a lot of literature and theory relating to ethics and questions of the paradoxes of redemptive suffering and feminist ideas about those things. And once in a while, they would come up, and I would see her name, I would, I would read about her ideas and I would think, this is fascinating.

I don't really see how this fits. And my husband then at the same time was doing a theology master's degree at Loyola. And in a class on the Trinity, they read a bunch of Simone Weil and it became this huge mystery in my mind. How is Simone Weil showing up in my husband's class on the Trinity? And in Radical Feminist, Adrienne Rich, who I'm reading, writing about, like, the problem of the institution of motherhood in mid century America.

How is she in both of these places? And that became a question that I just couldn't get out of my mind. And so I started reading Vey, and I started looking for more places where she was appearing. And that's a project that's taken me more than a decade now. 

Evan Rosa: It's so interesting to think about the impact that she's had and, and through the lens of feminist ethics and like a literary look at that, the expression of her work and not all female, but, but I mean, a significant number of contemporary female authors have taken her up and taken, taken the themes of her work and the kind of interesting perspective that she brings.

Can you talk a little bit about that influence and introduce. You know, the literary afterlives of Simone Weil. 

Cynthia Wallace: You bet. Yeah. So very early after Weil's publication in English, which happened in the early 1950s, the books that came out then, you begin to see her work appearing. Like Susan Sontag writes a review of her book that's very famous for the New York Review of Books.

And then a little bit later, you begin to see it in the poetry of Adrienne Rich, who at the time wasn't quite a radical feminist yet, but she was really concerned with the Vietnam War and civil rights, and they seemed to be kind of giving her an inspiration of a politics and an ethics that was maybe radical and costly and was about interpersonal kind of modes of attention.

But then you see, you continue to see Ve if you look through all of the decades that follow in literary writing in English. And it's definitely in men's writing for sure. Like Tia Zellier wrote the introduction to The Need for Roots and she's in Christian Wyman now. She's all over the place, but it's particularly women writers who seem really invested in these sustained engagements with both Ve's person and her ideas.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. I do want to go back to your previous book of women born, because I think you brought up this project of redemptive suffering and looking into the ethics of that, the complicated nature of Simone Weil, the difficulty to categorize her. And I'm wondering if there's anything that would be interesting and instructive in particular, I like this description of the risky self giving way.

that you describe, the dangers and the possibilities of suffering. I find that language really evocative and that risky, self giving way. I mean, that tees up Simone pretty well. 

Cynthia Wallace: It does. Yeah. Yeah, it does. And it also, I mean, it, it relates really closely to vase fascination with Christianity and her fascination with the cross, but it's also broader than that.

Right. My first book is based on my doctoral dissertation. in which I was really interested in this debate that we were having about literary ethics and the ethics of attention and the kind of attention that we bring to our reading. A lot of that conversation was really interested in the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

who was himself influenced by Simone Weil, although he also had some critiques of Weil. And what I was really interested in that project, again, is that we had this, like, almost hyperbolic discourse happening in literary studies, where there was a lot of excitement about paying attention to text in a way that was self emptying and self sacrificing and really But nobody in these literary studies conversations was talking about the fact that's really gendered language and that there are concerns that accompany that kind of mode of just over like over the top self sacrifice.

Now, what, what happens when you take that question, can self sacrificial kind of redemptive to almost openness to the other, can that have benefits still, even as we orient ourselves toward its risks, the people who really have those conversations, I realized were theologians and they were philosophers, feminist philosophers, but it was also happening in, in literary texts.

So, in that book I look at Adrienne Rich again, but I also look at Toni Morrison, and I look at Ana Castillo, and I look at Chimamanda Adichie, and I look at the ways that their books refuse the binary that says, Sacrifice can never be worthwhile, while also saying this is really, really risky, and it has been disproportionately applied to certain segments of the global population.

This expectation of sort of suffering self sacrificial care for the other. There are a lot of threads, but it is very much the precursor. to this project on VEI. And it's, again, the place where I first began to engage with her thought, because VEI similarly refuses the binary that says sacrifice is never appropriate, or sacrifice is always appropriate.

She refuses to say suffering is always great. And she also refuses to say suffering is never the appropriate choice for the sake of an ethical good. And we live in a moment, I think, where our culture would much rather fall on one side or the other of that debate. And I think they is one of the places where we can really hold the two sides together and look for the kind of productive tension that refuses to settle on one side or the other.

Evan Rosa: I love that phrase, productive tension. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: I think the reason I love it is it feels fleeting, difficult, challenging. It feels, it feels like a grasping after the wind at the moment. It's, we don't have enough examples of productive tension. 

Cynthia Wallace: No, and it's hard work. And that's one of the things that I also love about VEI is that She really wants to recover the value of hard work, which is another thing that we tend to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater in late modernity.

We're a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that things can be hard and that that could be a good. 

Evan Rosa: I really want to camp on this idea because I think Just to help motivate it for those of us who, who are either less familiar with Faye's work or, or that sometimes when that productive tension, I mean, let's just acknowledge that the productive tension there is a complicating factor.

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: It requires nuance and carefulness and the reason we might want to fall on one side or the other is because it's just easier. So that hard work of productive tension is an absolutely wonderful point. Help us understand how Ve approaches this kind of self emptying or self giving attention. I think we need to do some definitional work to help understand what's there because it's deeply rich in her work and it's a fascinating concept to be thinking about.

It's far more applicable, I think, than people might realize. 

Cynthia Wallace: So, for readers, or for listeners unfamiliar, Vey's work was mostly published posthumously, the work that she's famous for now. During her lifetime, she wrote for sort of small magazines and she wrote really topical, timely essays on issues of labor.

early in her adulthood because she was a labor organizer. She was a union activist. The work that she's really famous for now in the Anglophone world is the book Waiting for God and the book Gravity and Grace, which is really just excerpts extracted from her notebooks and the book, The Need for Roots.

And in Waiting for God, she includes an essay about homework, where she basically argues that homework, geometry problems, school studies, they invite us to practice a kind of discipline of attention that isn't a muscular grasping. It's kind of the opposite of hustle culture. It's this patient waiting.

open receptivity. And again, you can see how that language can get gendered fairly quickly, but this is for everyone. And she says that the most remarkable thing that education can do is to invite students into that kind of open, patient, receptivity, to knowledge. And then she says that skill is precisely the scheme, the same skill that's necessary for prayer.

So if we want to have openness to the divine, it's not a grasping, it's a kind of receptive waiting. And the active, the most active participant in that relationship is God. But then she also argues It's very importantly that this kind of attention that we practice in school studies and that we can practice in prayer is the heart of an ethic in which when we see someone who is suffering.

We do the incredibly difficult thing, actually paying attention to them. And she, she tells the story of a particular Holy Grail can miss where the most, the most remarkable thing you can say to someone is, what are you going through? And then you listen, and then this doesn't come up so much in that essay, but in, in the rest of her work at the same time, What she kind of extends that to is if you hear someone's need and you have the capacity to fulfill it, you are obligated to do so.

Hmm. So if someone is hungry, you feed them and if someone is lonely, you accompany them and so on and so forth. And it would also, I think it's really easy then to hear that as a very. exclusively interpersonal ethic, but she also argues in her work that we are obligated to structure societies in a way that minimizes the hurt and harm to people and maximizes the degree to which their real needs are fulfilled.

So it's this tiny thing that begins with geometry homework, right? And it extends to an entire social structure where we learn how to slow down and pay attention to other people, including people who are really different from us, which is why she returns again and again to the story of the Good Samaritan.

Evan Rosa: I'm pretty sure you're referring to this essay, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. 

Cynthia Wallace: I am. Yes. 

Evan Rosa: Which is a great title. And I mean, she's, In that essay, she's connecting attention to prayer. I mean, it's very deeply connected for her, if not synonymous, I'm not sure what you think about that, but, but it's a self emptying prayer.

It's just fascinating just to associate attention with self emptying. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, she's saying that attention to really attend to someone is to make room in yourself for the other to enter. And so in a spiritual relationship, I mean, this is modeled after Christ on the cross and in the incarnation, right?

But this is also modeled on just a kind of refusal of what we now might call egocentrism, just this sort of, not just like full of myself. experience, but also the kind of bound boundary itself where we're so afraid of that we're armored up and we're afraid of vulnerability and tenderness. And she's arguing for something really different from that's radically open to the divine.

But then again, as you say, it's synonymous with prayer, this attention, but it's also synonymous for her with the kind of ethic. She doesn't see any of these things. She sees them all of a piece. And so our daily lives and our spirituality And our interpersonal relations and our politics are all part, or at least potentially all part, of a discipline of attention that takes practice.

And that's where she comes back to the idea of practicing even for young people in their schoolwork, that there is a coherence in her vision of how we can learn how to do this.

Evan Rosa: I want to aim toward what you're doing in in the literary afterlives, because it's fascinating to now. Complicate the story with questions of justice and feminism. The way that this does get gendered is really interesting. So I want to be moving in that direction, but I do want to just camp out with this concept of making room for the other.

I'm going to quote a little bit. It's you quoting Vey, but again, from this essay, not only does the love of God have attention for its substance, Vey says, the love of our neighbor. Which we know to be the same. Love is made of the same substance. And this idea of recognizing that the sufferer exists, kind of making space for them in one's mind and attention, um, you can see how a person committed to union solidarity, uh, in the labor movement and making space, making room, and then identification with the sufferer is so important for her.

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There's a really, there's an interesting sort of, and I write about this in the book, but in VA's reception, she's often divided into the spiritual thinker and the political thinker, and this is one of those examples of the fact that I really don't think we can separate those out.

She just has this really robust, in her later thought, this really robustly holistic vision of a spirituality and an ethic. And the same, yeah, the same kind of openness, and we might even call it hospitality, that one can exercise toward the suffering other. That's the kind of hospitality, it's a, I mean, theologically that's a little fraught, but the hospitality that one can exercise in welcoming God, which makes me think about theologies of Mary, you know, like we can, they wasn't thinking about that, but there, there is a rich conversation about actually the hospitality.

there. And so Denise Levertov, who is a person who, who did not make it into the book, but could have been there. She was really influenced by Vey as well. And I have an article that I've published or a book chapter about that before. Levertov famously wrote herself into a Catholic conversion. In the process of writing this many sectioned mass for the day of St.

Thomas Didymus, so the doubting Thomas figure, and she famously tells the story. So we go through the components of the mass in this poem sequence. And by the time she got to the end, she realized she had come into something like faith. And I don't, I'm not sure that was completely separate from her interest in Simone Bey.

I think there's some connection there, but one of the things Levertov argues in the poem, or one of the things that the poem invites us into is an idea that faith involves an ascent to welcome God. And so the poem's last section. is asking this question, basically, like, how could we do this? How could we invite?

How could we make room for God in this way that I think is really consistent with Faye's vision of attention and prayer. And in the very last lines of the poem where Levertov has been meditating on God as a little lamb. She ends the poem finally after pages and pages of struggle. She finally says, So be it.

Come, rag of pungent quiverings, dim star, let's try if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light. So Leveretov has ended this poem of real struggle with the idea of whether welcoming God is even possible for her life with this invitation to say, okay, Lamb of God, come and I'll see if I can, I'll see if I can welcome you.

I'll see if I can try to take care of you in this sort of tenderness, which again, I think is a really beautiful poetic image of what Vey is talking about. 

Evan Rosa: For Vey. that connection between love of God and love of neighbor as being of the same substance. Um, you, you did already briefly mention it, but I want to kind of drive home the point that like this central ethical question of what are you going through being so important and central and the way that kind of reverberates into other works.

You can see how like the careful asking of that question is this expression of attention for the other. It's fascinating to ask it of God as well. I'm not sure what you think about that, but I wonder if you could describe how it continues to impact and influence, because I think We can look to the influence of it as evidence that it's really a deep point of connection for the human spirit.

Cynthia Wallace: Absolutely. Yeah. I think so. So vase, I do think that there's room to say to God, what are you going through in vase thought? And I think that relates to her theology of the incarnation. She has just a really robust sense. of kenosis or self emptying in the incarnation. But that's also consistent with Faye's vision of creation, which is one of the places that her thought is quite remarkable and provocative, where she basically argues that in order to make room for all of us to exist, God, who created out of love, stepped back to make room for us.

And in Faye's vision of the world, And this is how she negotiates the problem of evil in Faye's vision of the world. God is not a particularly active participant in how things work. God created a world in which there are laws of nature. So, so Faye keeps coming back to this language of gravity, right? And even that, that claim that the substance of prayer and of ethics is the same.

She really loves to use almost scientific language to talk about laws of nature. that are also laws of spiritual life or like kind of metaphysical. And so she argues that God isn't particularly active in the world that we have, except for when we open ourselves to these chances of divine encounter. But that in terms of like weather or you know, like politics or things like that, God isn't moving chess pieces.

That's her vision because God loved us enough to want us to exist. And that meant that God had to step back and make room for us in the creation. And so her vision of God is different. Her imagination of God is different from how I think a lot of contemporary Western people think about an all powerful, all knowing God.

Faith thinks about God as having done exactly what she's asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power. 

Evan Rosa: This might be a good moment to kind of really fully appreciate the way that once we consider matters of justice and feminism, that giving up, that self emptying, that making room, the self giving, the riskiness of it all.

I think it's time to call out the tension, hopefully a productive one, around how that kind of self emptying has been exploited. When it comes to the treatment of women. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. So it's risky. And this is one of the reasons why I was so fascinated with this question of vase influence from the get go, because so much of North American feminism in particular was interested in the 19th century as well as the 20th century.

In exposing the degree to which women have been disproportionately expected to sacrifice themselves. And feminist theologians have been really interested in exposing the degree to which church teachings around self sacrifice or even the fruit of the spirit of love and joy and peace and patience were disproportionately expected of women and then women of color and people who have experienced colonization then point to the intersections of those injustices and the ways in which their experiences again have been even more disproportionately kind of sacrificed for empire and economy and so on and so forth.

And so there is something extremely risky in offering a general ethic of self sacrifice to everyone. without giving that accompanying kind of warning. But what I love about so many of Vey's literary interlocutors is they're willing to do that work without jettisoning it altogether. So somebody like Adrienne Rich, a radical feminist, is saying, I am deeply uncomfortable with the extent to which this ethic of self sacrifice can go.

But I also recognize that we live in an era of really. egocentric individualism that is hurting our communities. And so we need to think about something that isn't necessarily a feminized kind of victimhood, but that is a rigorous, freely chosen gift of self for the sake of the other or for the sake of the common good.

Evan Rosa: Give me a little bit more about Audrey and Rich, because that question, the central question, tell me what you're going through does appear in a lot of her work. And I think maybe it would be helpful to do some, some closer looking at what you just articulated, the need for there to be a freedom in it originating in the individual.

Um, it must originate in, in, in a person in order for it to be truly the kind of redemptive self giving that 

Cynthia Wallace: one might hope for and 

Evan Rosa: not, and not hung over the heads of the marginalized or oppressed. 

Cynthia Wallace: Exactly. Yeah, there are so many ways into that discussion. So Rich loved Vey's question, what are you going through?

And you see it in so much of her poetry starting in the late 1960s. And some scholars of Vey argue that one of the reasons her work was so appealing to people in 60s is that in post war America, there was this almost like flattening optimism where everything was about prosperity and comfort. And then you see the radical movements of the 60s really kind of contradicting that and they offer us just this breath of fresh air.

She's bracing in that context. I think that's part of what drew Rich to her work in the 60s. But Rich is one who, again, is really interested in an ethic that cares about the other, interpersonally and then in broader and broader figurations of community and responsibility and justice. But one of the things that she appeals to in Vae that helps her with that is Vae's distinction between suffering and affliction.

And so we see Rich appealing to that in her book of Women Born, which came out in 1976. And they, and this is very much related to Vey's ethic of attention. They argue that all humans suffer. We all go through pain. That's just part of our experience. But when we go through protracted physical pain, when it becomes chronic or when it's irresolvable, and then on top of you pile on this, the psychological suffering that comes with.

Long pain. And then on top of that, you have the social stigmatization and isolation. And this can be something that originates like in an experience of chronic illness, which Faye herself experienced, or it can be something like war or colonization. These are other examples that she gives where there's pain in the body, but also in the mind and the soul.

And it's a very holistic pain. She argues that that kind of a pain, which in English we render as affliction in translations of faith, that affliction isn't something that we can, it's not something we can resolve for ourselves. It's that kind of affliction that requires the attention of a compassionate.

Whereas pain can actually, just pain that passes, even though we as humans often seek to avoid it, pain can be productive. Even suffering can be productive if we choose it and we use it for, for some. And so it can be costly to, you know, fight for a cause. It can be costly to care for another. But that's not the same thing as affliction.

And so what Rich finds so productive in Vey's distinction between pain or suffering and affliction is the idea that affliction is something that we should work really hard to help people out of and to avoid people falling into. Whereas Costly kind of care for the other is something that is of real value and that we shouldn't shy away from sometimes choosing to enter into.

And so in Rich's book of women born, she's talking about childbirth actually, when she's talking about this and she's saying that childbirth can be really productive pain, but, and so we don't need to necessarily be afraid of the pain of childbirth. That's different from the kinds of pain that come about because of injustice, for example.

And that distinction is one of the places that Rich, as a feminist, who's really concerned that there not be disproportionate suffering for women and that there not be sort of mandated, socially mandated suffering for women, Rich is still recuperating the possibility of creative and productive pain. 

Evan Rosa: Is there any, any bit of Rich that you would want to read and quote?

Something that's particularly expressive of this? 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm trying to, I'm trying to think there's so much, there's so much. So I think that one of the places that Rich writes about this most beautifully, and she often does this thing Vae's ideas while also critiquing the excess that she sees in the person of Vae, because we haven't really talked about this but one of the challenges of Receiving Vey and then rendering her in literary afterlives is the way that she died.

And Vey died very famously. of tuberculosis, but at the end of her life, she found it very difficult to eat. And she had for a very long time been restricting her food in solidarity with those who didn't have enough food at the warfront. And it seems as though that had physiological consequences in her capacity to eat.

And this is a hotly debated, contested question of whether they dying by suicide because she didn't eat enough, which was a coroner's report, but which surprised all of the people who knew her in London at the time. But it led to this kind of almost mythological kind of mystery that surrounded her and that led to more attention to her person than her ideas, which was exactly what she didn't think.

But there's not a way for somebody like Adrienne Rich to engage with Faye's ideas without also engaging with the concern that if you take self emptying too far, You might sacrifice your life. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. And I would just only briefly interject to say that you point out that another commentator suggests that Fervet theory was never separate from action.

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. And I 

Evan Rosa: love If you can't separate the ideas from a person, you know, you're not gonna be able to separate the theory from the action. And now that's putting your money where your mouth is in some way. That's like consistency of life. That is putting actions, sorry, putting ideas into action. And that kind of consistency of, you might even say that continence of will to be able to do that is astounding.

And yet look where it leads when you have an ethic of self emptying, put that into action, is it? 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, exactly. And so this is, so this question of they and of what a life can be worth and what a death can be worth. Can be worth. Mm-hmm. And what, and whether women are allowed to be martyrs or only men, like this is a question that interests Mary Gordon in her fictionalization of VA's life in novels like Pearl.

As I write about in the book, and this is a question that I think comes up when I write about Annie Dillard. who was just as attracted to these ideas of you give up yourself for your art, you sacrifice. She says, you know, you have to go at your life with a broad axe if you want to be a writer. But, but then, you know, she lives a long life.

So people are willing to receive those ideas about artistic self sacrifice. from somebody who isn't, you know, wasting away, right? Yeah. The question of Vae's life and particularly of her death is one of the things that really troubles feminists who engage with her because as you say, the kind of radical integrity of her enactment of these ideas.

May be part of what led to her death at a very early age. She was 34. And so that, that question is one that Adrienne Rich really grapples with because she wants to learn from Vae about the potential, the creative potential of choosing pain for the sake of goodness or justice. But she doesn't want that to end.

in a kind of almost hyperbolically feminized self emptying or self erasure. And so one of my favorite poems that where Rich really struggles with this is the poem Hunger, which is from the 1970s and which is dedicated to Audre Lorde, who was Rich's friend. And in that poem, Rich envisions just this expanse of solidarity.

of women around the globe who need to feed their children. And the fact that politicians aren't particularly interested in making hunger the kind of central platform for their politics. But Rich saying, and she learns this, I really believe that she learned the centrality of hunger as a political and feminist issue from Simone Bay.

So she, so in that poem, hunger, She writes about this kind of risky solidarity with women who are different from her. And so, for example, we have these lines, I know I'm partly somewhere else. Huts strung across a drought stretched land, not mine. Dried breasts, mine and not mine. A mother watching my children shrink with hunger.

I live in my Western skin, my Western vision torn and flung to what I can't control or even fathom. So, so Rich there is, she's looking at what it can be to attend to another person somewhere else. Who is like her, but also different from her. We're always negotiating that line, right between self and other and what we share and what's distinct and rich.

I think learning from they is thinking about hunger as a central, ethical and political issue, and she's bringing that into conversation with feminism, saying women. We have to feed our babies and when we're malnourished we can't even nurse our babies and I recognize this as a woman and I recognize this as a mother and I also have to recognize that I'm always as a person in the West seeing from my Western eyes but still trying to bear witness which again is risky.

And what's fascinating to me is that this poem, which is so shaped by Vey's influence on Rich's imagination and ethics, still has a line that talks with concern about a woman genius starving herself. So Rich embeds her concern about Vey as an example of the kind of extreme limit case. Even as she embraces the heart of the ethic of caring with kind of risky compassionate attention for people who are suffering all around the world.

Evan Rosa: I mean, it's so interesting that the suggestion that hunger might be this kind of unifying political grounding issue. And, you know, there are of course, all sorts of organizations seeking to address hunger around the world. And yet it's not in the news. It's not, 

Cynthia Wallace: it's not, 

Evan Rosa: it's not cool enough. It's not trendy enough.

It's not, for some reason, we've lost the outrage in some way. And this suggestion that it is the kind of bedrock of the feminist issue itself. It brings us back to the body. It brings us back to daily need. 

Cynthia Wallace: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: Back to the beautifully feminist vision of the provision of that nutrition and nourishment from one's own body to another's.

That's profound. 

Cynthia Wallace: It really is. It's beautiful. And it reminds us too, there's a way of reading Vae that people sometimes fall into that's really disembodied. She's sort of like this Gnostic, body denying kind of mystic, but Vae brings us back to the body over and over again. And I think that's one of the things that people like Adrienne Rich really recognized in her, was And again, it's not just about embodiment and materialism.

It's about Vey's refusal of a lot of the binaries that we've fallen into in late modernity between, you know, the material and the spiritual or the kind of justice and charity, or, you know, the kind of micro and the macro. So many of our really polarized debates. They just refuses to accept the terms and she says no the most productive way to think about this is through the contradictions You have to follow both sides To the kind of limit of their capacity for thought and then see what you find in that kind of untidy Both and ness.

Evan Rosa: Another chapter in the book explores the way that Annie Dillard has internalized and interacted with Vae, particularly around attention. And you're also drawing quite a bit from Vae's waiting for God in looking at Dillard and, and how Simone Vae influenced her. What stands out to you as, as most significant about the way in which Annie Dillard interacted with and benefited from Vae?

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, that's a question close to my heart because Annie Dillard was the writer who made me want to be a writer of nonfiction. I, you know, I read Annie Dillard in undergrad and it's something in me just woke up. You can do this. You can write about the world in this way. And so, you know, there's just her attentiveness to the world, but then the way that she renders that.

with these sentences that tend to go on and on sometimes, but there's just an expansiveness, right? And so Dillard's style, as well as her content really compelled me as an 18 year old to keep reading all of Annie Dillard. So I didn't know it at the time as an 18 year old, but Annie Dillard was profoundly influenced.

And we're going to talk a little bit about, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with the question of what it is. to attend to the world and what it is to be a kind of creative medium, like an art artist open to almost the divine sort of inspiration to bear witness to the world in a way that tells the truth about what is brutal in the world while also telling the truth about what is glorious in the world.

And that is straight from they, they is so committed to us seeing and engaging with. The world as it is. So this is why she's suspicious of our imaginations because she doesn't want us to distract ourselves from contemplating the void. She wants us to tell the truth about suffering. She wants us not to pass by like a beaten and bloodied person on the side of the road and say, I don't have time to look at that right now.

She wants us to both see what is. immensely beautiful here and what is enormously difficult here. And she thinks that both of those practices are necessary for the other. And I think Dillard, what we love about Dillard, so many people love Annie Dillard's writing, right? What we love about Dillard is that we love that Annie Dillard helps us see the beauty and the pain, both of those things.

She helps us see the inserts. are glorious and disgusting. And that we, and that creation is organized in such a way that in order for creatures to live, other creatures have to die, that we have to eat. And even if we are vegetarians, we're eating living things, you know, that, that reality I think is, is a really profound influence of Ve on Dillard.

But in the book, I trace how Ve continued to influence Dillard. So in her early work, Annie Dillard's really engaged with this sort of aesthetic of attention. She's really keen to create something meaningful in her engagement with the world. And there were people who criticized that and who said, Annie Dillard, you don't really seem concerned very much about justice.

You don't really seem concerned about The world that ought to be, you're so focused on the world that is. Yeah. But I trace in Dillard, through Vey's implicit influence, a movement that I think is a development in her later work, including in her 1999 book, For the Time Being, which is One of my favorites where she's contemplating natural evil and injustice.

So she's contemplating weather patterns and sand. She's also contemplating, you know, murder and mass murder. And she's looking at this, the scale, but she ends that book with thinking about what it looks like to be responsible for each other and what it looks like to respond to that scale of human suffering.

And I think that they is one of the major influences that led Dillard out of a purely aesthetic kind of interest in attention to that more robust ethic of responsibility. 

Evan Rosa: I want to come back to kind of the creativity in that and the sort of the way that attention and creativity come together, because in the artists and particularly the nonfiction writer, giving one's attention to the world.

Paying attention to that which is not overemphasizing the imagination or that which could be the idealism of say, the philosopher perhaps, but just really the stark interest in what really and truly is. How do we get from attention to creation? 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. So, so they argues that what real attention is giving our attention to that which does not exist.

And so she argues even in that ethic of attention. A person who's radically suffering, a person who's afflicted has been in a sense cut down by society and robbed of their life. They've been made nothing. And so if we give them our attention, we allow them in voicing what they're going through in some sense to come back to life.

And that is the kind of mini paradigm that I think some writers have borrowed from Bay and said, if we attend in this kind of open, receptive, patient, radically self giving way to the world that is, or even to maybe a work of fiction that doesn't yet exist, but we give our time. and we give our patience and we give our willingness to kind of help something else come into being, that's creative process.

Right. That's what it takes. You see so many, I love writers writing about writing and I teach a class, I teach a class on life writing. So, so, you know, biography and memoir and all of this. And so frequently the advice that writers give is you just have to show up, right? Like butts in chairs, like you have to come to your desk and you have to open yourself to what is before you.

And you have to paraphrase some other things sometimes, right? It takes discipline and it takes a willingness to let this creative work come into being and so many writers write about their creative work as something that is kind of mysteriously other from them, like it comes to them. It's not fully under their control, right?

Evan Rosa: Yeah. It reminds me, I mean, this is going to be familiar to you and perhaps others, but writers writing about writing it's in particular this on creativity and attention. It's Joan Didion. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.

Cynthia Wallace: Exactly. 

Evan Rosa: The act of writing is, I mean, it's both creation and discovery. 

Cynthia Wallace: Ah, so it's from in us, but it's also from beyond us, or it's from in us, but it's from, it's outside of our full conscious control. There's, it's mysterious. It's another form 

Evan Rosa: of productive tension. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's part of, I mean, that's part of what Vey is interested in all of these realms of attention, right?

She's interested in this radical openness to something that is beyond our expectation and our control. Something that is surprising. That's her experience of the divine. She had these mystical experiences where she felt Like Christ came to her and she said later, I had never read mysticism. I didn't know that this was a thing that could happen to people.

But she, and she said, I think it's good that I hadn't because then, you know, I had this openness and this kind of innocence about it, but that's the same with people in radical suffering or otherwise, right? Like the most productive friendships are friendships. And she says this over and over again, too, where we let the other person be who they are.

Instead of trying to make them who we want them to be and, you know, parenting so many, there are some examples of this, but, and writing as well, like the projects that we think we know exactly what they're going to be. If we open ourselves to the process, they usually surprise us. Right. And that's part of the joy of creativity.

So that, that reminds me of a really important part in Vey's school studies essay that we haven't talked about, which is that pleasure and desire are part of this. Yeah, that, yeah, that it's not just, Oh, like white knuckle it through this thing you have to do. It's no, there's joy in creativity and there's joy in curiosity and there's joy in learning.

And there's even. There's joy in the mystery of faith, and there's joy in injective relations, right? There's so much potential for delight in these places. This isn't about a kind of dour discipline. This is about opening ourselves to, like, the fullness of human being.

Evan Rosa: What I see you really trying to do in this is, is articulate this productive tension, the way in which they, as both a person, as a writer, as an activist, embodies that productive tension, is a complicated figure, makes space for both this kind of radical self emptying love, which is so risky, as well as an attention to dignity and the humanity of all of us, including herself, including the single mother whose work really comes down to some kind of impossibility at the end of the day, that she be both able to exemplify a kind of self love, self respect and care for oneself and also give so much of herself.

And I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of particular individuals in my mind who I know, and I see in the community who are getting their kids to baseball practice. and working free jobs. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: And that's the kind of impossibility that I'm talking about. And I think, and to call that a mere, merely productive tension or redemptive suffering, that's that, that we know that kind of.

borders on hand waving. It borders on kind of oversimplification and lack of appreciation. So as you've thought this through, and as you've sought to explain the way that feminist thinkers have taken Envée, where do you go with that? Where do you go with it? 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah, I go, I go to, I think maybe three places.

One of them is the way that Simone Veil argues that suffering that can be ameliorated should be. So she argues, again, that we should be structuring societies in a way that facilitate flourishing for all people and that the people that we should look to. And I mean, and again, she was really concerned with factory workers in France.

in a just radically dehumanizing labor system. She was concerned with colonized people at a time when most European thinkers were not criticizing colonization. So they just really thinking about the people who are at the margins of our social structures of kind of prestige and privilege. And she's arguing, we shouldn't ever just give somebody a badge and say, good job, you sacrificed yourself.

That's not what this is. She's saying in every case where we have the capacity to ameliorate suffering, we should be doing that. And then when you have these instances of suffering that are inescapable, then we need to find ways to make meaning of those and learn from them. But that's never an excuse to just.

Give somebody a blue ribbon and say, good job, carry on in your suffering. If we could do something for it. That relates, I think, to the way that so many of the writers who then bear witness to Simone Weil's life attend to her life. the way that they attend to her life. And we haven't really talked about the book's last chapter where I read a bunch of poetry that is invested in VEI as in a kind of biographical practice.

So we have a number of books by poets like Maggie Hellweg and Stephanie Strickland and Sarah Claussen and Lauren Nielsen Glenn and Anne Carson. And I'm afraid I'm forgetting somebody. Kate Daniels. Yeah. And they devote entire books of poetry or entire sequences of poems to memorialize the complexities of Faye's life and thought in poetry.

And what they're doing there is they're enacting her ethic. So they're saying, Simone Weil, like you gave yourself over to this vision of the world that you wanted. And we think you maybe gave too much in the end. And we're bearing witness to you with compassion. And we're bearing witness to there's so much tenderness in this poetry.

It's just heartrendingly tender how, how these poets say, like, they, we, we admire you and we respect you and we learn from you. And we also wanted you to live longer than you did. And we wish that we could have given you. The gift that you ask us to give to everyone, which is to say, what are you going through?

And then for that to have been enough for you to maybe live longer than you did. And maybe that wasn't possible. Maybe we've misunderstood the constraints that, that limited Jay's life. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of mystery about the end of her life still, but I love that the poets, they give her the kind of attention that she invites us.

to give each other, which leads me to my third thought on this, which is that this vision is most beautifully enacted in community. So if everyone is seeking to attend in this way, then nobody is suffering alone. You know, if everybody is seeking to attend in this way, then we're working for structures that support single moms.

If everybody is trying to think about hunger as a bedrock issue, it's possible that nobody could be hungry. You know, there is this, there is this beautiful, again, I think it's a productive tension in between just rigorous freedom of the individual and community responsibility that envisions a common good.

that invites kind of everybody to care for everybody else. And that's something that so many feminists have found compelling in vague. When you begin with care, when you begin with feeding people, you know, when you begin with recognizing the goodness of meeting people's needs and paying attention to what people have to say and are experiencing, something really different is possible.

in the world. And I think it's really beautiful. And I think that's some of what in the literary kind of render the fate, even after her life, there's a beauty there, even in the compassionate kind of sorrow and mourning for the loss of her. There's a real beauty in that sense of. What is possible through shared practices of attention?

Evan Rosa: I want to close by asking you to, from your conclusion, talk about the vulnerability of precious things. You start your concluding chapter with this really beautiful note from Vey. The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because it is a sign of existence. Blossom of fruit trees. And that's amazing.

I think it's fitting in light of those, in light of those comments on community, in light of the productive tension we've talked about and the need for both, both sides of this equation and that fundamental central question in the ethic of what are you going through the vulnerability and the The beauty of that vulnerability is really starkly present in, in Vey.

It's why I think so, well, one, I could, I would suggest one reason so many poets, so many artists have taken her up as an exemplar. I'm wondering what thoughts you might have on the beauty of vulnerability and to close with that found poem from Simone Vey's notebooks that you identified. 

Cynthia Wallace: Sure thing. I, uh, I've been thinking about the line about the blossoms of fruit trees, which shows up, I think, in several places in her notebooks.

Walking through my own neighborhood of late, it, it's been fruit tree blossom season. So walking my kids to school, I just keep thinking about Simone Weil. And it's so true. What is so beautiful about Those blossoms is that they come and generally they come at the time at the end of winter when we most need them to come.

And then we go and for Vae, the kind of ephemeral nature of the beautiful is part of what's beautiful. She thinks that things that are really beautiful are the truly vulnerable. And then also the things that are just so far beyond us and stable like the stars. And in those two kind of sides, again, we see the kind of both and here where the stars you can look up to, and they're so far beyond us.

And they seem, they're not, but they seem to be completely timeless. And then the blossoms, which are so beautiful and cannot last, and also are a bit of a sacrifice to make the fruit, right? The beauty comes. And it attracts the attention of the pollinators and then the fruit can happen. But she was really attracted to this idea of, you know, unless a grain of wheat dies, the plant can't grow too.

So I think these are related. 

Evan Rosa: I feel compelled to point out to satiate. The blossom or the grain of wheat falls to the ground in order to respond to the hunger. 

Cynthia Wallace: Exactly. And they also loved the idea of light and how photosynthesis works. She just had this beautiful vision of the kind of wonder of what it actually takes for us to be fed in a very literal sense.

But it's also consistent with the idea that as much as we'd like to

that our strength is what makes us wonderful. Our weakness is so frequently where we meet the limits of ourselves and our need for each other. And in many cases, a kind of need for the divine. And so I think she, she captures that so beautifully in poetry of her own, right? And so I'll happily read. I end the book with a series of thoughts that are in first and last notebooks.

And when I came upon them, I just thought this is part of why we love to write poetry about Vey because she was writing poetry even when she wasn't meaning to write poetry. So, here we go. Compassion is what spans the abyss which creation has opened between God and the creature. It is the rainbow.

Compassion should have the same dimension as the act of creation. It cannot exclude a single creature. One should love oneself only with a compassionate love. Every created thing is an object for compassion because it is ephemeral. Compassion directed to oneself is humility. Humility is the only permitted form of self love.

Praise for God. Compassion for creatures. Humility for the self. Without humility, all the virtues are finite. Only humility makes them infinite.

Evan Rosa: I think it's a fitting place to end because it's such a beginning and, um, a conversation on VEI, maybe at any point, is always going to just open up new opportunities. So much interpretation and, um. Exposition, but also a creative expression into new directions. I mean, it's, it leaves so much to continue to work with and continue to struggle with.

Cynthia Wallace: Absolutely. 

Evan Rosa: It's worth giving our attention to. 

Cynthia Wallace: Yeah. I feel like at the end of a project, I've only just begun, right? 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. Well said. Cynthia, thank you so much for joining me. 

Cynthia Wallace: Oh, thank you again so much for inviting me.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Cynthia Wallace. Production assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information and to subscribe to our email list, you can visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. There you'll find all sorts of educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to our show, welcome, and remember to hit subscribe and your favorite podcast app so you don't miss our next episode. And as I asked at the beginning of the show, if you're a loyal supporter and a faithful listener, we would appreciate your consideration for year-end gift.

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