2025 Readings 19

 I just finished my 19th book of 2025, Robert Zaretsky's The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. As compared to some of the other books I've read lately, where I seem to be somewhat indifferent to (at least according to my rereading of my own posts), I absolutely loved Zaretsky's book and highly recommend it. In fact, I'm going to do the ultimate academic man-crush act: email Zaretsky to let him know how much I loved the book. I've actually only done this a few times. Scholars spend years and years grinding away at books which, because they're academic, never have much of an audience. Writing is a lonely profession, and academic writing is an especially lonely profession. So, I always want to let professors know that I've read their work and tell them how much I appreciated it. 

I first stumbled across Simone Weil's work when I read her essay on the Iliad as part of my research. She's yet another one of those brilliant writers or artists or thinkers that I can't believe I didn't know anything about (once again, I blame Indiana for the grossly inadequate education it gave me). Zaretsky's five core chapters gives you a sense of the aspects of Weil's thought that he explores: 1) "The Force of Affliction," 2) "Paying Attention," 3) "The Varieties of Resistance," 4) "Finding Roots," and 5) "The Good, the Bad, and the Godly." In my class on the Nature of Evil we read about her view of Affliction, so she's been  gaining more and more intellectual traction with me. I'm seriously thinking about using Zaretsky's book to construct a class around her thought for next spring semester (which, theoretically, might be my last semester at Champlain), using Zaretsky's book as the foundational piece. Zaretsky's book introduced me to other fascinating corners of her thought, and I was especially blown away by her view of Attention and Roots.

Let me include a paragraph from Zaretsky's discussion of Weil's philosophy focusing on Roots, to give you a sense of how accessible he makes a very complex thinker:

"Nevertheless, Weil's notion of uprooting captures one of modernity's defining characteristics: the fact and feeling of homelessness. For Weil, the act of uprooting is not just physical, but also social and psychological; one can be uprooted without ever having moved or having been moved. What Thomas Carlyle called the 'cash nexus' - the transformation of all human relationships into monetary transactions - pollutes our traditional and nurturing places. 'Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate,' Weil writes, 'and manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of numbers.' The rationalization and industrialization of the workplace grinds into bits the moral roots of countless workers. 'Although they have remained geographically stationary, they have been morally uprooted, banished, and then reinstated, as it were on sufferance, in the form of industrial brawn.' The bonds that once existed among artisans - the traditions and travels of masters and journeymen that tied them to the past and future - had been snapped. As a result, Weil writes, 'each thing is looked up as an end in itself.' The consequences are a catastrophe to which we have grown accustomed, being taught to embrace ends, not means; to see others as objects, not subjects; and to accept what Weil calls idolatry, and forget the integrity that once defined out relationship to work and ourselves."

As you'd expect, I pestered Janet with this paragraph as I was reading it. Her new book relates to community, and this is a marvelous fit. I can't recommend this book too highly. 

I'm getting close to having read twenty books this year, which brings me back to the article that started this count: the astonishing amount of Americans who don't read much of anything. Remember, that a whopping 46% of Americans in 2023 didn't read even one book - and only eleven percent of the American population read twenty books (which was listed as the far end of the reading spectrum). I never wanted to quantify reading because I naturally love it, but this is sort of an interesting experiment. I suspect I'm reading a little more than I normally read, although that has more to do with escaping the nightmare of these years than it does because I'm trying to impress myself with any particular number. On the surface it probably seems that I'm reading a lot, but this is also an indication of the fact that like most readers I normally have several books going at the same time. For me, there's 1) the book(s) on my nightstand, 2) the books in the living room where Janet and I often read at night, 3) the books squirrelled away upstairs in my office, 4) the Audible (although I'll probably switch to the library to wean myself even more from the evils of Amazon) books or Great Courses that I listen to on my way to school or at the gym, and 5) the book(s) on my desk at school. So, if I post one book here at the blog and then another one the next day, that's not an indication, probably, that I blew threw a book in one day, but rather that I finished a book in the different reading corners of my life.