The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
I steer my attention, as if guiding a spotlight, and shine it on the woman sitting directly across from me. She is wearing patterned floral pants and a look of fierce concentration as she tackles a crossword puzzle in the tabloid floating on her lap. She nods her head rhythmically while waving her pen like a conductor’s baton, or a french fry. She is focused, but is she paying attention? No, Simone Weil would say, she is not.
When the train reaches my stop, Holland Park, I mind the gap, and head for the exit. I am not so much walking as surfing, swept along by the crowd. I try to pay attention but my velocity precludes that. Speed is the enemy of attention. Stepping out of the station, I blink away the sudden sunlight and struggle to regain my bearings.
Transitioning from subterranean to terrestrial life is always tricky. There’s that moment of disorientation, of not knowing where you are and, oddly, who you are, either: respectable terrestrial being or sketchy denizen of the underworld? Strangers look at you, or so you imagine, sizing you up, unsure whether you belong here, in the light.
Eager to confirm my surface credentials, I start walking. Where exactly I don’t know, but forward momentum is essential. The neighborhood, not far from Notting Hill, is London cozy. I pass cafés where you can spend an entire day nursing a single coffee and bookshops lovingly curated and stubbornly defying the laws of economics by their continued existence. A Pakistani man is selling flowers.
I turn the corner onto Portland Road and walk a few yards until I reach No. 31. A fresh coat of white paint adorns the front door. Otherwise, it is indistinguishable from the other town houses on the block. No sign. No engraved placard. Simone Weil’s admirers apparently don’t extend to London’s guardians of historical sites. I can’t say I’m surprised. The “philosopher of margins and paradoxes,” as one biographer called her, never expected, nor wanted, fame.
Weil lived on the second floor, which she rented from one Mrs. Francis, a widowed schoolteacher with two small children. Weil took a liking to the boys, helping the younger one, John, with his homework. He’d curl up by the front door, waiting for “Miss Simone.”
Weil loved her little room, with its view of tree branches during the day and the stars at night. She loved London, too, and she loved the British, full of humor and kindness. “Especially kindness,” she wrote in a letter to her parents, who had sought refuge in New York. “People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.… I tenderly love this city with its wounds.” A wounded soul in a wounded city, I think, as I watch a young couple ring the door next to No. 31, a bottle of wine in hand.
Weil’s day job was with the Free French movement, a ragtag group of French exiles working to liberate their nation from Nazi occupation. Weil earned a reputation as a tireless worker—and serial dreamer. “She was boiling with ideas,” recalls her friend Simone Pétrement. Her quixotic schemes included parachuting into occupied France and leading a frontline nursing squad (“women of tenderness and cold resolution”). She labored over the details of her plan, and even bought a parachutist helmet and an aviation manual. Not everyone shared her enthusiasm. “But she is mad!” Charles de Gaulle exclaimed when he read of one of her schemes, none of which came to pass.
When she wasn’t dreaming, she was writing, and writing. In just four months she cranked out eight hundred manuscript pages, plus countless letters. She rarely slept more than three hours a night, often working until dawn. The pace took a toll on her already frail health. She ate less, coughed more. Her headaches grew worse. She worried she was going insane.
On April 15, 1943, she failed to show up for work. Worried, a friend hurried to No. 31 Portland Road. He found Weil on the floor, unconscious. She was rushed to Middlesex Hospital, where doctors determined she was suffering from tuberculosis.
She was extremely weak, barely able to lift a spoon, but somehow continued to read and write. The doctors insisted she slow down. She ignored them. “The steadiness of her writing, even in her last letters, is astonishing and presupposes an extraordinary act of will,” says Pétrement.
Simone Weil didn’t like the dreary urban view from her hospital window. It saddened her. The doctors agreed country air would help, and in August 1943 she was transferred to a sanatorium in the bucolic town of Ashford. She supervised the packing of her most precious books: Plato, Saint John of the Cross, the Bhagavad Gita.
At the sanatorium, she remained lucid, her serious eyes as bright and probing as ever. Her physical health deteriorated, though, no doubt exacerbated by her refusal to eat anything substantial. She never told her parents about her illness, an act of either duplicity or compassion, I’m not sure. She ended her last letter to them with a cheery “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love.” In the evening of August 24, shortly after receiving a visiting colleague, she slipped into a coma. Five hours later Simone Weil was dead. She was thirty-four years old.
The cause of death, concluded the attending physician, was “cardiac failure due to degeneration through starvation.” That report caught the notice of a few local papers. “French Professor Starves Herself to Death,” said one headline. “Death from Starvation” another. The medical verdict has been disputed ever since. Some say Weil took her own life; others insist she did not.
Seven people attended her funeral, mostly friends and colleagues from the Free French movement. A priest, due to officiate, never showed up. He missed his train, a lapse of attention that Simone Weil, bighearted as she was, surely would have forgiven.
The seven-minute train ride from Wye to Ashford is over in a flash. I couldn’t tell you what I saw or heard or thought. My attention needs more than seven minutes to come online. Before I know it we’re pulling into Ashford. I exit the station and, after walking a few blocks, join the High Street. It’s a pleasant pedestrian walkway lined with cafés and secondhand shops.
Walking farther, savoring the sun’s rare appearance, I notice a man paying close attention to something on the pavement. As I inch closer, I see that he has a brush in one hand and is grooming a dog. How cute, I think.
I look more closely, more attentively, and see that it is not a real dog. It is a sand dog. A dog made of sand. So expertly has he fashioned the curve of its tail, the folds of flesh above its snout, the wrinkles etching its neck, that I had mistaken it for a sentient canine.
“How long did that take you?” I ask.
What a silly question, I later realize. Attention is not measured in minutes or hours. (Better fifteen minutes of pure attention, said Weil, than eight hours of lazy, diluted attention.) I could have asked the man other, more salient questions. How did he shut out the distractions around him and focus on the sand dog? How did he persevere when the wind smudged a paw, or the shifting sands collapsed an ear? Yet I did not ask these questions. It’s easier to probe the quantity of attention than the quality. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what matters most.
I walk along Canterbury Road, which, despite the fabled name, is a busy thoroughfare with trucks whizzing by. I come to an intersection and spot a sign: “Simone Weil Boulevard.” The description on an adjacent placard is insultingly brief, describing her as a “French authoress and philosopher who died in Grosvenor Sanatorium.”
I climb a small hill, then enter Bybrook Cemetery. A woman and her elderly mother arrive. They’ve brought flowers and a wind chime, which they hang from a nearby tree.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” says the daughter. I’m not sure if she’s referring to the musical chime or the flowers or the azure sky or perhaps the way one can find joy in the most unexpected of places, even a cemetery, if one pays close enough attention. No matter. It is the quality of our attention, not its object, that counts.