BOOKS
IN DEFENSE OF ANIMAL NATURE
THE NEED. FOR ROOTS.
By
Simone Weil. Translated from the French
by
Arthur Wills, with a preface
by
T. S. Eliot. Putnam. $4.00.
There are a few moments of real daring in Simone Weil's
book of reflections on the destiny of man (in particular, France) such
as the ones in which she takes literally the assignment the Free French
Government gave her (in what must have been an act of exasperation;
she had been begging them to Jell her help the Resistance movement,
and had proposed that they allow her to parachute into occupied
France) to write a work useful to the post-war reconstruction; and in
these moments not only is Miss Weil at her best, but her work is, of
all things least to be expected of her,
sociology,
and of a superior order.
Her daring is of the kind frequently encountered among Utopians:
with an absurd practicality she comes right to the point, not even
bothering to acknowledge the existence of the so-called reality problems
that furnish the hard-headed with an excuse for venturing nothing.
Her description of the lot of the proletariat in the large cities and fac–
tories, the wretched education they receive, and the miserable entertain–
ments to which they turn in the lack of a genuine culture, constitutes,
together with her corresponding description of the condition of the
peasantry, one of the most sympathetic and "realistic" accounts of
modern life to be found anywhere; and her handful of suggestions for
reform are startling in their simplicity, and in the impression they
create that they might really work. She has the radical insights for which
children and, oddly enough, marginal and "uprooted" people are
famous (the latter is a significant point, and I shall want to return to
it); enough so, to make T. S. Eliot sound very uncomfortable in his
preface and impatient to get away from so free and idiosyncratic a use
of the Christian tradition. (Incidentally, the period of Christianity which
makes the strongest appeal to her is the earliest, and she retains some–
thing like an image of it as a standard for all her evaluations; that is
probably one reaSOn why she writes so well of proletarians, seeing them
as martyrs to an unconscious protestation of faith-they, the most up–
rooted, exert the strongest demand for roots, which in itself, in her
