“Only the greatest art,” Murdoch noted, “invigorates without consoling.”

Attentiveness entails the difficult task of waiting, not for the world to take note of us, but for us to take note of the world.

Reverence, in short, is the realization that there is more than this and that there is more than me; it is both the cause and consequence, as Iris Murdoch notes, of “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

Herein lies one of her enduring insights: true resistance begins with clear thinking. As thinking creatures, we are incapable of accepting servitude. But true thinking cultivates moderation, not excess.

Weil called for the abolition of all political parties. She argued that parties, regardless of their ideological coloration, share three basic traits. They are dedicated to nurturing collective passions, designed to exercise collective pressure upon the minds of their members, and devoted to their collective self-preservation.

Weil instead asserts that values and sensations are coterminous. As Peter Winch notes, “our concepts, which give the world its shape, are unintelligible except as concepts exercised by beings whose common life exhibits certain aspirations and values.”8 This interpretation—one where the epistemological is the ethical—seems to pull the rug out from u

Peter Winch memorably captured this condition: “I cannot understand the other’s affliction from the point of view of my own privileged position; I have rather to understand myself from the standpoint of the other’s affliction, to understand that my privileged position is not part of my essential nature, but an accident of fate.”

First, she gives this notion a particular twist: by embracing the going and not the getting there, we will ultimately get to somewhere more important than the original destination. Even should we fail to solve a geometry problem at the end of an hour, we will nevertheless have penetrated into what Weil calls “another more mysterious dimension.”16 T

You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it . . . that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.”