{"id":2704,"date":"2020-12-30T18:14:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=2704"},"modified":"2021-03-31T15:11:09","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T15:11:09","slug":"recovery-of-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/30\/recovery-of-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Recovery of Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Recovery of Roots<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Simone Weil recognized \u201cthe need for roots\u201d; Czeslaw Milosz named our age as one of homelessness. Both remind us that our work is always rooted in who we are.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Tessa Carman
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When Czeslaw Milosz published his Polish translation of Simone Weil\u2019s selected writings in 1958, the flame of Weil\u2019s brief life had been quenched for over a decade. Weil\u2014mystic, teacher, activist, philosopher\u2014had died in 1943 in London from a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis. She was thirty-four years old. Earlier that year, while working for the Free French, she had addressed the question of rebuilding France after the war in what would be her last completed work, L\u2019Enracinement<\/em> (The Need for Roots<\/em>). In the shattering first decades of the twentieth century, wherein human lives were uprooted like so many weeds, she wrote: \u201cTo be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.\u201d<\/p>

In his 1980 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Milosz named Weil as one of those writers \u201cin whose school I obediently studied.\u201d Milosz first encountered Weil\u2019s name in the November 1945 issue of Politics<\/em>, where Mary McCarthy\u2019s translation of Weil\u2019s \u201cThe Iliad<\/em>, or the Poem of Force,\u201d appeared. Weil had written the piece after the fall of France to Germany five years earlier, in 1940. \u201cForce,\u201d wrote Weil, is that which \u201cturns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.\u201d Force affects both inflictor and inflicted, however. No one truly possesses it, she argued: force is \u201cpitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims.\u201d<\/p>

Milosz viewed Weil\u2019s work as essential in thinking toward a third way, avoiding both Marxism and nationalist Catholicism\u2014that is, \u201cthe type of religion that is only a social or national conformism.\u201d He would also name Weil\u2019s \u201cdeep concern with evil\u201d as another reason for her influence on his thinking. Both Milosz and Weil, however, noted the disruption of the current modern predicament. In \u201cWhy Religion?\u201d Milosz wrote that he lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human imagination was occurring\u201d:<\/p>

In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared, the belief in life after death was considerably weakened, the borderline between man and animals, once so clear, ceased to be obvious under the impact of the theory of evolution, the notion of absolute truth lost its supreme position, history directed by Providence started to look like a field of battle between blind forces. After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas has been erected, from Origen and Saint Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The poet looks back at the destruction, a reverse Sodom and Gomorrah\u2014the fallen archons of this world blasting the houses of the innocent.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Homelessness<\/strong><\/p>

Weil recognized \u201cthe need for roots\u201d; Milosz named our age as one of homelessness. In a letter to Thomas Merton in 1960, he expressed the need to recover \u201can image of the world, ordered by religion,\u201d for modern man.<\/p>

Scarcely a year after Weil\u2019s death, in 1944, Milosz witnessed the destruction of Warsaw by the withdrawal of Nazi forces. (Weil had written in her essay that \u201cthe destruction of a city\u201d is \u201cthe greatest calamity the human race can experience.\u201d) Earlier, during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, where the evening quiet would be rent by the cries of Jews being murdered, Milosz had noted how softly, imperceptibly, the end of the world could come. In \u201cA Song on the End of the World\u201d he noted how monstrosity could caulk the cracks in the mundane:<\/p>

And those who expected lightning and thunder<\/p>

Are disappointed.<\/p>

And those who expected signs and archangels\u2019 trumps<\/p>

Do not believe it is happening now.<\/p>

As long as the sun and the moon are above,<\/p>

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,<\/p>

As long as rosy infants are born<\/p>

No one believes it is happening now.<\/p>

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet<\/p>

Yet is not a prophet, for he\u2019s much too busy,<\/p>

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:<\/p>

There will be no other end of the world,<\/p>

There will be no other end of the world.<\/p>

With the obliteration of Warsaw, he and his wife, Janka, evacuated the city and moved through the country on foot\u2014at one point they dug potatoes for a farmer in return for lodgings\u2014before finding refuge near Krak\u00f3w at the house of Catholic publicist Jerzy Turowicz. After helping Jewish families escape the Nazi purge in Poland, the Miloszes found themselves refugees at Turowicz\u2019s table.<\/p>

At Turowicz\u2019s estate, Milosz wrote of their flight from Warsaw:<\/p>

When we were fleeing from the burning city<\/p>

And looked back from the first field path,<\/p>

I said: \u201cLet the grass grow over our footprints,<\/p>

Let the harsh prophets fall silent in the fire,<\/p>

Let the dead explain to the dead what happened.<\/p>

We are fated to beget a new and violent tribe<\/p>

Free from the evil and the happiness that drowsed there.<\/p>

Let us go\u201d\u2014and the earth was opened for us by a sword of flames.<\/p>

The poet looks back at the destruction, a reverse Sodom and Gomorrah\u2014the fallen archons of this world blasting the houses of the innocent. But instead of turning into salt, the poet is further impressed with the reality of evil, and with the need to explain to the living what had happened.<\/p>

Earlier that year, the Allies landed at Normandy to free Weil\u2019s France\u2014a deliverance she would not live to see. In Poland, upon Warsaw\u2019s ruination, the Soviet Communists took command, and the country underwent another darkness.<\/p>

In a 1981 interview in the New York Times<\/em>, Milosz would explain that in \u201cextreme situations\u201d of affliction, such as that which he and others like Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam underwent, \u201cgood and evil acquire elemental force. Western civilization is losing that clear distinction: Everything can be explained away; everything is relative. In dramatic circumstances, you feel clearly the good forces and the demonic forces in action.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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This vision of Christianity\u2014as the religion of the powerless, of those who have been treated as things, of those seeking salvation from force\u2014and of Christ as a man subjected to force would shape her understanding of Christ and of her vocation.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Affliction<\/strong><\/p>

The disruptions of the twentieth century marked the first half of Milosz\u2019s life. Before he lost Warsaw, he lost the Lithuania of his childhood. (He famously quipped that he was \u201cone of the last citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.\u201d) The Russian Revolution, followed by the First World War and the Russo-Polish War, all uprooted his family\u2019s life. His father, a road engineer who worked for the czar and then the Bolshevist government, traveled for his work but based his family in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. After the Revolution, they moved to the Lithuanian countryside. When Milosz returned to Vilnius, where he would study law, the city had become part of Poland.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

In 1934\u20131935, Milosz visited Paris and met his uncle, Oskar Milosz, a poet and mystic who would then become his mentor; at the same time, Weil had taken a sabbatical from teaching and begun a year of factory work in order to have first-hand experience of the lives of the poor and the experience of affliction, or malheur<\/em>\u2014that is, the \u201cuprooting of life,\u201d a kind of suffering that enslaves the soul. The conclusion of this year of soul-crushing factory work marked the beginning of her awakening to Christianity: In 1935, after the year that \u201ckilled [her] youth,\u201d her parents took her to Portugal. One day, she traveled alone, \u201cin pieces, soul and body,\u201d to a \u201cwretched\u201d little village, where she witnessed a procession of fishermen\u2019s wives holding candles in honor of the village\u2019s patron saint and \u201csinging\u2026 hymns of a heart-rending sadness.\u201d Here she experienced an epiphany: \u201cChristianity is the religion of slaves par excellence\u2026 \u00a0slaves cannot not adhere to it, and I too along with the others.\u201d Later she would say that she had been given the \u201cgift of affliction\u201d by the Love who also suffered malheur<\/em>, who was cursed in \u201chis whole soul\u201d while hanging crucified on the tree.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

This vision of Christianity\u2014as the religion of the powerless, of those who have been treated as things, of those seeking salvation from force\u2014and of Christ as a man subjected to force would shape her understanding of Christ and of her vocation. After the year of the factory, she wrote that ever since \u201cI have always regarded myself as a slave.\u201d To imitate Christ in identifying with the oppressed and the outsiders\u2014this she viewed as her particular calling, even so far as to refuse baptism.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

However, in a letter to her friend Father Perrin, she noted the possibility that \u201cone day I shall suddenly feel an irresistible impulse to ask immediately for baptism and I shall run to ask for it. For the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent.\u201d In the meantime, she determined, she would follow Christ. \u201cIt is not my business to think about myself,\u201d she wrote near the end of the same letter. \u201cMy business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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To recover this kind of attention becomes one step to counter Force, and to recovering a rootedness of soul.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Exile<\/strong><\/p>

Milosz began serving in the Polish embassy for the new Communist government in 1945, stationed first in New York and then in D.C. When he visited Warsaw again in 1949, \u201cit was if he were entering a prison inhabited by people steeped in hatred for those who ruled over them, people whose faces expressed fear.\u201d A friend from Vilnius confided, \u201cWe are slaves here.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

In 1951 he decided to defect. With the help of a friend who despised Stalin, Milosz would live in Paris as a refugee for several years before accepting an offer to teach at UC Berkeley in 1960. He would continue to live in exile for the next thirty years until he resettled in Krak\u00f3w in 1993.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Milosz sought still to keep rooted in his homeland by composing his poetry only in Polish. He also never forgot the Lithuanian countryside\u2014especially the river and the trees beside his grandfather\u2019s farm\u2014where he grew up. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski eulogized Milosz thus: He had a \u201cgift of combining raw observation of the moral and political world with a sense of things unseen, with a religious experience\u201d and \u201ca sharp, just judgment of earthly matters and an impassioned search after God.\u201d As a poet who maintained a religious imagination as well as membership in the Catholic Church, Milosz embodied a sign of contradiction for two primary kinds of modern disillusionment: with religion, perceived as irrelevant and outmoded, and with poetry, perceived as an arcane word game. In \u201cAgainst Incomprehensible Poetry,\u201d Milosz noted that to be both a Catholic and a poet is heretical to the modern cult of art, wherein the poet is priest of a new religion that must exclude old forms. On the other hand, the kind of contemporary poetry that most interested Milosz was poetry that responded to modern man\u2019s uprootedness. This poetry<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

observes the situation of man now, in this phase of scientific-technological civilization, with its lack of a foundation on which to base values, with its search for warmth and goodness in bonds of love and in the family, with its fear of transience and of death.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Amid \u201cthe disintegration of [modernity\u2019s] complex of ideas,\u201d this \u201cpostmodern\u201d poetry responded to the loss of rootedness. To recover roots in a homeless world, this kind of poetry found inspiration in the ancient Far East, from Chinese and Japanese poetry in which \u201cthe macrocosm is reflected in each concrete detail, like the sun in a drop of dew.\u201d To recover this kind of attention becomes one step to counter Force, and to recovering a rootedness of soul.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The disillusionment of the early twentieth century seemed to prove that the higher the aimed-at heaven, the harder the fall.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Grafting<\/strong><\/p>

In his essay \u201cThe Importance of Simone Weil,\u201d Milosz noted that Weil rejected \u201cthe notion of progress in morality,\u201d a mark of modernity \u201caccording to which crimes committed three thousand years ago can be justified to a certain extent because men at the time were \u2018less developed.\u2019\u201d Weil dismissed both Christian and Marxist versions of this notion, excoriating the latter for positing that \u201cby walking straight ahead one would ride into the air.\u201d The disillusionment of the early twentieth century seemed to prove that the higher the aimed-at heaven, the harder the fall. But the idea of inevitable moral progress was not killed along with the atrocities of the twentieth century; rather, it seemed simply to undergo a new form once the cynical generation, which directly experienced the shattering of illusion, died. Milosz cites Leszek Kolakowski\u2019s observation that Marxists practice theodicy, but with History as the deity rather than a personal God. However, Milosz points out that \u201cbelief in the magic blessings of History is being undermined by the very outcome of that belief: industrialization.\u201d He writes further: \u201cIt is more and more obvious… that refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

This dream of wholeness remains, though now in a form that both Weil and Milosz both would see as devilish: transhumanism. According to this religion of final and complete efficiency, humanity does not have to be healed or saved from disintegration, but left behind. Such a direction directly opposes the \u201chigh degree of attention [Weil gave] to the sufferings of mankind.\u201d Working within a theological framework shaped by her own Platonic-Christian synthesis, she could see that \u201ca member of a technical civilization holds the position of a god [with regard to Nature], but he is a slave to society.\u201d Weil, however, instead of escaping into the future, sided \u201cwith the oppressed,\u201d becoming as much as she could one of those oppressed and on the outside.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

We moderns are not remarkable for our experience of duality and longing for unity, but perhaps the modern world is distinct for its disillusionment and metaphysical confusion\u2014both of which are shaped by Jacques Ellul\u2019s la technique: <\/em>that is, \u201cthe totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency<\/em> (for a given stage of development) in every<\/em> field of human activity.\u201d For Ellul, the machine does not comprehend technique: rather, \u201cthe machine represents only a small part of technique,\u201d but yet \u201cit represents the ideal towards which technique strives.\u201d Just as Weil\u2019s force treats persons as things, so \u201ctechnique transforms everything it touches into a machine.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

In a poem Milosz wrote at Warsaw in 1945 (\u201cDedication\u201d), the speaker asks, \u201cWhat is poetry which does not save \/ Nations or people?\u201d It\u2019s a question that echoes throughout Milosz\u2019s work, but especially what he wrote during and immediately after events such as the Warsaw Uprising. Can poetry be recovered after Warsaw? After Auschwitz? Yes, says Milosz: if we pay attention, if we do not ignore what has happened, if we respect the real. In his book-length A Treatise on Poetry<\/em>, the poet decides to recognize the \u201ccommon plight\u201d not only of the suffering Poles, but for others who suffered during the same terrible years.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Poetry was one path Milosz took to rediscover the human and to explore the great expanse between those who would explain away suffering by the grand march of history and those who would allocate suffering to a pat place in a pat scheme, withholding the attention that Weil calls \u201cthe rarest and purest form of generosity.\u201d Often Milosz would recall this line from Weil: \u201cDistance is the soul of beauty.\u201d In a foreword to Jonas Mekas\u2019s There Is No Ithaka<\/em>, Milosz expounded on the \u201cold truth\u201d this sentence expresses: \u201conly through a distance, in space or in time, does reality undergo purification. Our immediate concerns which were blinding us to the grace of ordinary things disappear and a look backward reveals them in their every minutest detail.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Weil wrote that affliction, like force or \u201cblind necessity,\u201d is \u201cindifferent,\u201d that it \u201cdeprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.\u201d Through the attention and the distance of poetry, Milosz sought to break through the force of technique and the enslavement of affliction into a space where the \u201csecret and silent\u201d action of grace could occur: a place, too, where \u201cthings\u201d\u2014human beings enslaved by force and technique\u2014could again become grafted into the communion of the living.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What it means to \u201cchange the world\u201d may be shaped far too much by the dazzling, multiplicitous possibilities of the digital age, and our putative mobility.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Attention<\/strong><\/p>

Weil lived in a white heat, writing and teaching despite ill health, taking on grinding factory jobs, sleeping on the floor and fasting in order to identify with the poor, and volunteering for spy work and military activity despite her almost disastrously bad eyesight. Flannery O\u2019Connor wrote to her friend \u201cA,\u201d \u201cWeil\u2019s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible.\u201d Albert Camus, friend of both Weil and Milosz, wrote to Weil\u2019s mother that she was \u201cthe only great spirit of our times.\u201d Milosz described her in one essay as \u201cantimodern, aloof, quixotic, a searcher for the ultimate truth\u201d (\u201cShestov, or the Purity of Despair.\u201d) Her work stands outside conventional categories of thought such that everyone has trouble putting her into a box. Her work insists, then, that we come to it humbly. And indeed, as Camus hoped, those who recognize Weil\u2019s \u201coverwhelming\u201d witness ought to \u201chave enough modesty to not try to appropriate\u201d it. O\u2019Connor wrote to the same friend a year later that Weil\u2019s books were such \u201cthat I can\u2019t begin to exhaust.\u201d Weil, she wrote, \u201cis a mystery that should keep us all humble.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Milosz, like Weil, is able to attend to \u201cintolerable suffering,\u201d though in his case he did not have to seek it out. Both writers consider the oppression that humans impose upon themselves and each other with such acuity and compassion that theists, atheists, and those in between can appreciate their insights. But Weil would always remain a challenging spirit to Milosz: \u201cI consider myself a Caliban,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWeil was an Ariel.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOne would like to astound the world, to save the world,\u201d wrote Milosz in The Land of Ulro <\/em>(1977), \u201cbut one can do neither.\u201d What can we do, then? \u201cWe are summoned to deeds that are of moment only to our village.\u201d We can root ourselves, for, as Weil observed, \u201cWhoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn\u2019t uproot others.\u201d What it means to \u201cchange the world\u201d may be shaped far too much by the dazzling, multiplicitous possibilities of the digital age, and our putative mobility. More and more, however, our deepest social connections are mere tribes of the homeless, alliances of the uprooted.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The more we bear each other\u2019s suffering, the more we can see that we are seen.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Suffering<\/strong><\/p>

In describing the reawakening the French poet Pierre Emmanuel had to undergo when he left Communism, Milosz noted the struggle to recover the weight of everyday language: \u201cbecause doctrines which lead to paradise on earth, constantly pushed into a distant future, direct our eyes away from the earth, sensual things around us\u201d (BBC talk, November 19, 1955). Milosz himself had to learn how to recover what Merton called his \u201cyounger earthy and cosmic self\u201d in writing his great work of remembrance, A Treatise on Poetry.<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Nature may be indifferent to suffering, but if we are to find meaning in what passes, we must \u201cwrest\u201d poetry\u2014not meaning, for we must assume that it is there\u2014from the world, loving the world more than our songs of it. It means paying attention to the world, but also resisting that which would enslave us and prevent us from loving each other. It means recognizing our conception of what is to be saved, and what it means to be astounded, may be diminished according to our own uprootedness. As David Cayley put it, in summarizing Ivan Illich\u2019s thought on the age of systems, \u201cit is only as suffering, embodied persons that we can turn and face one another.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

To pay attention, then, is still, as Mary Oliver writes, our \u201cendless and proper work\u201d\u2014as poets, but also as human beings. Milosz and Weil both remind us that our work is always rooted in who we are, where \u201ccreation is working itself out,\u201d in Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s words. \u201cYou must change your life,\u201d Rilke\u2019s poem says, \u201cfor here there is no place \/ that does not see you.\u201d We could go further: the more we bear each other\u2019s suffering, the more we can see that we are seen.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Before her mortal fire was put out, it is said that Weil entered the waters of baptism, albeit irregularly.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Homecoming<\/strong><\/p>

Before her mortal fire was put out, it is said that Weil entered the waters of baptism, albeit irregularly. Her friend Simone Deitz recounts that, while in a Middlesex hospital in August 1943, Weil called for a priest to discuss baptism. The priest in question became irritated by Weil\u2019s questions on whether she had to accept every item of Catholic doctrine. He called her \u201cproud,\u201d and left. Later, as Eric Springsted recounts,<\/p>

Deitz asked Weil: \u201cAnd now, are you ready to accept baptism?\u201d Weil replied, \u201cwith much warmth,\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d Deitz took water from the tap and pronounced the formula, \u201cI baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.\u201d<\/p>

A few days later, she arrived home.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Tessa Carman<\/strong> writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tessa Carman. Simone Weil recognized \u201cthe need for roots\u201d; Czeslaw Milosz named our age as one of homelessness. Both remind us that our work is always rooted in who we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"0","ocean_second_sidebar":"0","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"0","ocean_custom_header_template":"0","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"0","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"0","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"0","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"off","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,10,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-essays","category-issue-10","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farefwd.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Dominicus-Johannes-Bergsma.jpg?fit=1024%2C458&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2704"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2711,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions\/2711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\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