Stillness, Motion, and Mystical Physics

In typical nerdy fashion, my summer reading has begun with old, stuffy non-fiction, namely a collection of essays by Simone Weil called On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God. Weil is smart to the point of making me feel like a blind first grader trying to tackle Infinite Jest. But what I do understand is illuminating. Take, for example, her thoughts on motion versus stasis:

The whole weight of the universe, in the form of affliction, presses on all men without destroying a single man and inflects the language without breaking the metre.

Weil was born in a time of struggle and sadness. She was raised as an agnostic Jew and by age 6 was refusing sugar because the soldiers on the frontlines of WWI couldn’t have much of it. She engaged in intellectual repartee with Leon Trotsky and fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Then she had a Christian mystical experience in the same church as St. Francis of Assisi, became an advocate for the poor and downtrodden, and died due to Tuberculosis, possibly exacerbated by her refusing to eat more than the rations she thought available to soldiers during WWII. She knew affliction.

In her suffering, Weil made apparent that we are inevitably caught up in motion, in space-time. Stasis is impossible and yet we have a concept for it; it exists as eternal possibility. For her the human face is a perfect example. In a beautiful visage one recognizes the desire for stasis, for eternity. Yet, intellectually one recognizes the imminence of decay, one realizes that that face will one day be reduced to a hollow skull six feet under. Weil says this makes us “violently aware that…[we are]…nailed to a point in time and space.”

The undertone of crucifixion is no accident. To be nailed to something is to be static, yet to be within time and space is to be in motion. These paradoxes, these challenges to the intellect represent one of the best parts of being human. We must find stillness in a world of fast cars, loose women, and dolla dolla bills y’all. Once we hone in on that desire for stillness, that “crucifixion of the intellect,” we can, perhaps, glimpse peace and eternal love on hot summer days and rainy English nights.