The film,"Encounter with Simone Weil," won the special Founders Prize Monday at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival earlier this week, a long overdue recognition of the French philosopher whom Camus called "the only great spirit of our time."
Simone Weil was not what most people would call a happy or well-adjusted person. She was tormented by migraines. She was almost certainly anorexic and her death at 34 was probably due as much to self-starvation as tuberculosis. In 1930s Europe she was in the midst of radical movements, yet never really a part of them. As the Holocaust descended over Europe, she scribbled letters and notes, unable to strike effectively against the Nazis. As far as anyone knows, she never had an intimate relationship, emotional or physical, with any man or woman. And for all her intense intellectuality, all of her books are posthumous, based on her journals and letters.
But it was Simone Weil who said this about human happiness:
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
