BOO K S
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useful occupations, a self-replenishing style of life. But such values pre–
suppose mobility, as one comes to rest out of a state of motion, and
remains free to resume that state. This, again, has nothing to do with
roots.
The one meaning of the term, as she uses it, that may be able to
stand inspection is that of rootedness as the condition of religious faith.
Here the temporal difficulties are avoided, faith presumably being a
clinging to values of an order above and beyond the natural world. (I
grant, but only for the sake of argument, that such a combination of
words is meaningful.) But here again there are difficulties, waving aside
the immediate one, whether we are not talking plain nonsense: to the
extent that faith really is an act that lifts us out of nature, we are
freed of the obligation to represent rootedness in terms of this life, and
are in no better a position to reveal what it means; and even if the
consequences of faith can be shown to consist in a harmony between
ego and universe-the feeling of being at home in God's world-it
does not follow that such harmony will manifest itself in man's world, or
it should long ago have done so. Moreover, if our objective is the re–
construction of society, it seems to me a confession of failure to resort to
the supernatural, and an admission that the condition of rootedness is
not to be achieved on earth.
Now it seems to me that such considerqtions rule out the sessile
metaphor. "The need for roots" is merely an expression of the fact that
"uprootedness' is intolerable; beyond this it becomes a mistranslation of
the genuine need for restful satisfactions. These occur in animal life, in
the intellectual's no less than the peasant's, and the need for them
in
no way lessens our necessarily mobile character. But if one is to accept
Miss Weil's own principle of reconstructing society to the direct satis–
faction of human needs, it should follow that not a rooted society but
one which allows its members a maximum of freedom is desirable.
Actually, the ideal society, to reconstruct a well-known opinion of Mr.
Eliot, cannot afford to include many deeply rooted individuals.
If
the risk of freedom is really worth taking, it must proceed, in human
culture and society as it once did in biological evolution, through an
increase in mobility. A society of the uprooted does not provide this; it
leaves its populations to wither. But a rooted society is no better. The
clue, it seems to me, is given by animal nature, to the preservation of
whose necessarily restless and unstable life-patterns all societies must ad–
just themselves. Human beings are known to be the most restless animals,
and intellectuals, the most restless of human beings. They require open
patterns, the right to follow an erratic course; their intellectual preroga-
