Simone Weil

September 22, 2024

What Can We Learn From Heartbreak?

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin

It may be that everyone who ever reached the age of reason has suffered from a broken heart. Even those afraid of approaching someone for romance might imagine the person they desire and pine away.

Real hearts are resilient. They keep pumping, indifferent to the wound.

The loving kind of hearts have their own type of resilience. They mourn, endure, and often try again. Changed? That can be for the better, though it is a costly loss that leads you there: the end of courtship and countless plans and hopes.

Since we all have or will suffer in this way, might something positive come from the experience? Something to help us lead our lives and learn from hardship?

I think so.

Here is a short list of ways to enhance ourselves in the aftermath.

  • Learning Who We Chose And Why

One of the most valuable tasks we can undertake is to reflect upon the kind of people we are drawn to. Are they hard to get? Have they had many broken relationships themselves? Do they often blame others to justify their actions rather than take responsibility?

Did we ignore the danger signs our friends warned us of? Do the people we pursue remind us of someone else? Were we so taken by their appearance and sparkle that we ignored their minds and hearts?

We cannot change our former lovers, but we can change ourselves and increase our chances of finding a better-suited person.

  • Enhancing Our Empathy

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” wrote the French philosopher, teacher, and activist Simone Weil. It is possible to enlarge one’s empathetic capability by experiencing pain.

Weil’s life exemplified not only witnessing the suffering of another and giving the attention of which she spoke; she chose to experience it herself. Though this woman came from a privileged background, she took on punishing factory jobs for a year, entered the Spanish Civil War battlefields, and worked in the harvest.

None of us choose heartbreak, yet it offers something to learn about adversity. We can apply our experience and awareness to help those who have lost the one they loved in whatever way.

  • Acquiring Knowledge Of Our Resilience

When my patients explained their affliction, they often doubted they could take it on and get past it. I asked the following frequently: 

“Please tell me of the hardships you lived through before this.”

They ran down a mental list of such situations. 

“What inside you enabled you to survive?”

The sufferer proceeded to identify the human characteristics within him that got him through his previous misfortunes. 

“Do you still have those abilities and qualities inside yourself?”

The answer was yes, more often than no. Thus, the client affirmed the forgotten strengths he could still draw on.

Life contains everything imaginable: beauty, wartime horror, hope, and despair. If our ancestors lacked resilience, the planet would be without humankind.

Not everyone is resilient in every circumstance, but most have elements of a hard-won or inherited capacity to survive the heartbreak caused by a lover’s departure. We live to love again or not, as we choose.

  • Learning Kindness

The pain of breakups sometimes adds insult to injury. There are many ways to say, “We are done,” and some people hurt us with cruelty or indifference. 

Think of those who blame the person they left while failing to recognize his value or visible torment. Some people end a relationship by ghosting the other or sending a text rather than face-to-face. A few tap an intermediary to deliver the bad news.

Once we experience this kind of ending, it can instruct us on what not to do when we break up with someone. If we have loved another, the best we can do is honor what made them desirable in the first place and show them the respect we would wish for ourselves in the same circumstances.

St. Paul advised the Ephesians to speak “the truth in love,” not hate.

  • Changing Ourselves

If a gentle ex-partner had been insightful in revealing what we lacked, valid shortcomings might have been understood despite the pain of taking in this information. 

With former partners who were less wise, some of us might have thought the indictment unfair when hearing the list of our deficits. Others among us flee from the truth. We do well to discount falsehoods when considering the judgments of others in any case.

Most of us avoid or regret these discussions. The closure we seek then must be found alone.

There is an alternative path to the same knowledge. We can recognize our deficiencies by looking in the mirror and reflecting on why the relationship ended.

If we conclude that the mirror provides a sense of recognition worthy of internalizing, the future offers us a chance to change.

A long pattern of breakups leaves us with this task—not on the first day or the 50th day, but someday.

  • Enlarging Our Humanity

As James Baldwin wrote in the quote at the head of this essay, his heartbreak led to a new awareness about the human community:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I wonder why we find it so hard to remember the connection Baldwin describes. Perhaps it is because a significant portion of the shared pain of life—the unhappiness we all experience—is hidden. Maybe it is also because much of it happens to people we have never met or who live far from us.

We persuade ourselves we will outsmart fate.

Imagine this: one day a year, as if by magic, we could see through the momentary gladness of our fellow men to the physical and emotional scars they hide. On the same day, we would witness the tears they carry from the episodes we call the Dark Night of the Soul.

Would that cause us to treat each other more kindly?

I can only say that the message we take from heartbreak and suffering, however long or short, informs us of one of the reasons we are here, not alone but among others of our kind: that our foremost purpose in life is not to gain wealth, status, victory, or material things but to care for others.

To this, I believe Simone Weil would say yes.

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The top image is a Broken Heart symbol by Orazon. It is followed by photos of Simone Weil and Her Family in 1916 during World War I and Weil in a Cafe. Finally, a Kid Caring for Young by Joseph Lionceau. All of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

June 30, 2024

The Four Sensitivities

We all have friends who have been called sensitive. Some label themselves this way, wondering why they weep when peers shrug off the hurts. Parents do their offspring no favors when they make comparisons, pointing out the superiority of a sibling’s toughness or her speed at bouncing back. Life waits for the skin to grow thick. With age, delicate souls may harden themselves. It can be a matter of necessity. A second kind of sensitivity involves empathy. The pain originates in the other and is transmitted from her to someone who holds her dear. Though it is absorbed and felt by the empath, it does not disable her. Measuring one’s concern or affliction is a different question, but being empathic does lead to suffering and understanding at a deeper level. Such a person reads the sufferer’s internal state, listens to her, and cares. Anyone who responds with concern takes the role of a witness, carrying another’s wound. Thoughtful parents illustrate this in their identification with their children’s big and small misfortunes. Most people who offer solace bounce back faster than those who sustain the damage directly. Counselors present a special case. They maintain a therapeutic distance from the patient. If they were to duplicate their client’s feelings within themselves, they would (in a sense) become the client, as distraught or debilitated as she is. Any therapist or empathic individual who takes on too much of another’s feelings lacks the separation to soothe their counterpart. All helping professionals are trained to recognize the danger signs of burnout before compromising their ability to aid their clientele. A third level of sensitivity involves emotionality comparable to the person in anguish. Here is an example from my own practice: I received a referral to evaluate a teenager who sobbed when watching TV or listening to radio programs about victims of misfortune. These were strangers, but her heart broke just the same. Tears could not be prevented except by avoiding those media. No evidence of mistreatment, harsh parenting, or abuse was found. The extremity of her response to the world made living close to unbearable.

A fourth type of sensitiveness is similar to the painful reaction in the previous example but does not cause a complete breakdown. The sense of damage done to fellow humans causes her to take action despite her tears. This kind of individual tries to remedy the problem and will put herself at risk to do so. Her first step is to uncover the cause of the emotional or physical harm, which is related to the prevailing conditions within society at large. The life of philosopher, writer, and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) offers an unparalleled demonstration of this kind of virtue. When Simone, then six years old, heard that French soldiers lacked sugar and chocolate during World War I, she sent her sweets to the front. At age 10, she snuck out of her family’s residence to join striking laborers in a rally. In 1934, this young woman took a leave of absence from the school at which she taught to work in a series of blue-collar positions. These included engagement at the Elektro-Firma Alshom factory as a drill-press operator, followed by employment as a packer and then as a machinist for the car manufacturer Renault. Weil sought these jobs to understand the dangerous and mind-dulling conditions under which her fellow employees labored. Simultaneously dealing with the migraine headaches she experienced during her adult life, the first post brought her to the point of exhaustion. Weil sometimes wept, as she was expected to meet a quota that her limited manual dexterity and nearsightedness made impossible. On occasion, she endured burns because of the closeness between her workstation and a furnace. Simone came to believe she and her peers were the equivalents of slaves:
You kill yourself with nothing at all to show for it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the depths of your being.
Weil wrote, “Machines do not run to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men so that they may serve the machines.”

Others asked why she persisted in these efforts:
The suffering all over the world obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating me. The only way I can release myself from this obsession is to take on a large share of danger and hardship myself. That alone can save me from being wasted by sterile grief.
Indeed, she did her best to influence those with authority during the worldwide economic Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Despite her pacifist beliefs, she also took arms against the fascists in the conflict in Spain. Simone Weil never became hardened or indifferent. She was hospitalized with tuberculosis brought on by malnutrition and exhaustion in 1943. Prior to her collapse, she was employed by the French Government in exile based in London. Defying her doctors, the patient refused to eat as much as she needed. This self-sacrificing woman ate no more than her countrymen had access to in wartime France. To the end of her life at age 34, Weil believed, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness means simply being able to ask him ‘what are you going through?'” Albert Camus, the novelist, and 1957 Nobel Prize-winning writer, called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

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The first image is the Milky Way as photographed by Laura Hedien on October 17, 2023, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. Next is the George Frederick Watts painting Love and Life, 1884/85. The final two pictures feature Simone Weil. The first was taken during the Spanish Civil War, while the second shows her as a little girl with her family.