Simone Weil on Love and Its Counterfeit

How to tell a plaything from a necessity.

Albert Camus, a Nobel laureate himself and friend of many titanic natures, considered Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) “the only great spirit” of the epoch.

Before she died a death of solidarity in an English sanatorium, refusing to take more food than her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France were rationed, before she enlisted to fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Weil took a year’s leave of absence from he...