The
Need for Roots : Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward
Mankind by Simone
Weil,
T. S. Eliot (Introduction)
Written while Simone Weil worked at the French
Headquarters in London, The Need for Roots was published in 1949
posthumously under the title L'Enracinement. She had been commissioned
by General de Gaulle, head of the Free French forces, to write a report
on the duties and privileges of the French after the liberation. Weil
became concerned by the idea of uprootedness; she wrote this study on
the need for security. Her report called for her fellow French to
recover their spiritual roots. An intensely spiritual person, Weil felt
it an obligation to experience life as others had to, working on
factories and on farms. She was to die of tuberculosis a year after
being commissioned to write this book, having refused to eat more than
the rations of those suffering Nazi occupation in France.
"We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of
genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints." -- T.
S. Eliot in the Preface
About the Author
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most important social, religious
and moral philosophers of this century. Her books include Gravity
and Grace and Intimations
of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, both published by
Routledge.
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