Two Hundred and Four

I’ve grown a beard.  English is an odd language.  I haven’t done something, grown something.  I’ve stopped doing something.  

I stopped shaving when I stopped eating, but now I’ve started eating again.  It's only beans and rice that I got free from the local food bank, and it won't last long, so I’m still starving, but slowly, like a philosopher who’s slit his wrists and then bound them up so that he can continue philosophizing a while.

Philosophizing changes nothing, of course.  It’s dying that changes us, making us aware that we learn nothing.  Everything we knew at the beginning of our lives is still true at the end.  What’s changed is that now we give those truths our full attention, as Simone Weil said we should.  Living no longer distracts us.

I’ve been reading Weil’s essays, and I like the way she thought.  I sometimes think I would have liked her as well, but probably not.  Nor would she have liked me.  For her, everything good comes from and leads back to god, and I find that kind of thinking lazy.  I can usually forgive people for believing in a god if that helps them to be good, as it did Weil; but sometimes I find it hard to forgive such laziness, however much I strive to be tolerant.