In Susan Sontag’s 1966 book of essays Against Interpretation, there’s a little piece titled ‘Simone Weil’. Weighing in at barely three pages, the essay identifies a sort of extremism in our thinkers and writers, with the central example being Weil herself. If you’re not familiar with Weil’s biography, she’s a French mystic and political activist in the first half of the twentieth century. She is a little dramatic – she has this pattern of making grand political gestures (like running away to work in a factory, or running off to join the Spanish Civil War) and then getting injured or overwhelmed, so her affluent parents have to swoop in and nurse her back to health. Her heart is clearly in the right place – when she joined the factory, for instance, it was in the name of worker solidarity. Regardless of whether we agree with the actual steps she took, she clearly put herself on the line for her beliefs. She gave up a comfortable teaching job to go and work in a factory – she’s no dilettante. It’s something she clearly felt very deeply about, and she was willing to take action over it. That’s meritorious. At the same time, I think some of her gestures towards solidarity are undermined by her material wealth, or her family’s wealth. Her parents weren’t filthy rich, per se, but when Weil burned herself cooking during the Spanish Civil War, they were able to take her to Assisi in Italy to recuperate. They had enough. When I was first learning about Weil, I was part of a literature group on Facebook, and I asked for some general opinions on her work. One very kind person wrote me two or three thousand words about why they thought her activism was valuable, and in response someone else linked Pulp’s ‘Common People‘. It’s – you know, if you’re not familiar, it’s a song making fun of rich people who pretend to slum it. It includes the lines:

“But still you’ll never get it right
‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all”

Weil’s dad did in fact stop it all for her, on several occasions, taking her off to Assisi and putting her into sanitoriums and so on. That’s really the heart of the critique, with Weil: solidarity is all well and good, but it doesn’t make up for the material gap in people’s circumstances. If you’re rich, you can go and work in a factory, but if you ever get sick, your rich parents will come and get you. That’s the gap. That’s not an option that exists for factory workers. She might think of it as solidarity, but you can imagine it might come off as a sort of tourism or cosplay – this very dramatic performative gesture that’s ultimately undermined by its unsustainability. She tries to be working class, but her health isn’t good, and she can’t keep up the act. If you’re actually poor with bad health, you just die. If you’re Simone Weil, your dad takes you to Italy. Well, I’m being a little mean – Weil did end up dying very young, at 34. Accounts of her death are conflicted, but we know she had poor health, and it’s probably fair to say she taxed her body past its limit. I do want to have some level of respect for a woman who really clearly fought for solidarity until it killed her. She was committed. Nobody questions that. However, I think I do still resent the opt-in nature of her activism. Nobody should be living in those conditions. It kills people. We know it kills people. We don’t benefit as a society by adding another body to the pile. Anyway, Susan Sontag thinks Weil is a bit of a diva.

“I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom, or would wish it for his children or for anyone else whom he loves.”

For Sontag, that extremism is characteristic of thinkers in the modern day. You can’t just believe in worker’s rights, you have to quit your job and work in a factory. You have to be a martyr, a saint, someone who’s gone to these sort of inhuman extremes in service of a given belief. You can’t just be normal about things. There’s a book out this last month, actually – All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot, by Lucinda Price, an Australian writer and radio host. It tells the story of her own extreme relationship with beauty standards, as outlined in the blurb:

“Up until her twenty-fifth birthday, the number one priority in Lucinda Price’s life was to look good. She nipped, tucked, cut, plucked, shaved, tanned, crunched, squatted and starved. Then, she broke down.”

The book reflects on beauty standards over the past thirty years, and trails through Price’s own relationship with the idea. It seems like a book about someone who’s changed their views on beauty without necessarily addressing their underlying obsession. It’s the same energy you get from Christians coming out of conservatism and going real hard into whatever the opposite is. It’s honestly an energy that reminds me of an earlier version of myself. If this book was written by some quite moderate person, someone living in the world who’s still affected by social pressure, but who found a healthier way to process it, without all the cutting and plucking – no-one would read that book. The extremism is part of the appeal. As Sontag says, “it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity.” We don’t read books about having a normal one.

Sontag in her essay seems to waver on whether this approach to writing is good or bad. She suggests that readers don’t necessarily adopt the views of these extreme writers: “I cannot believe that more than a handful of [Weil’s readers] … really share her ideas.” Rather, she suggests, we read them for their commitment, for their unbalanced views, “for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths.” She reflects that “perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination.” Insofar as that trend continues in the modern day, I think now it’s probably more about the fact that sanity just doesn’t seem plausible. This doesn’t feel like a world we can be sane in. One of the things I loved with that Catholic tarot book was that it was so clearly unhinged. It’s moon logic. It’s nonsense, and in a way that feels like the only reasonable place to start.