St. of the Absurd

In another random, free-association moment , I started to think about Simone Weil, a French non-practicing Jewish intellectual who spent her young adult life in the shadow of the Second World War. She had a fascination with Catholicism, and eventually her arduous academic work compounded with frail health drove her to exhaustion and eventual early death in a hospital (I believe she was in her early thirties when she died).

While she wrote no major works, she did amass a collection of essays and letters to a priest with whom she was close, all of which are quite provocative and yet with so little to work with, most scholars pass her over as a footnote in the history of ideas. I find her fascinating, but I was actually thinking less about the things she had to say about Catholic theology and more about her plans of parachuting herself out onto the front lines of the war as an offering of " womanly solidarity" or whatever, and her childhood self-sacrifice of sugar and sweets "because the soldiers in the war had none, either."

Okay, so mostly I was just thinking about the exhaustion and death part in the hospital, and the similarities between hers and Marie Curie's self deprivation, (she was said to have lived off a handful of dried cherries and nuts per day while conducting most of the research for which she became famous, but don't make me foot note that tidbit, because I don't remember where I read it). Of course, Curie eventually succumbed eventually to radiation poisoning, but, yeah, we know the end of that story pretty well.

I can't wait to go on holiday. I am so very, thoroughly tired. The hell with the St. of the Absurd imagery, I should go find my St. Judas Patron of Lost Causes pendant (note: I don't have one) and do some bended knee begging to find my strength to go on for another week.

I need to go to one of those sanitoriums, with fresh air, fresh food and trips to the seaside. I think that's called "home," actually.