Did Pynchon read Simone Weil influentially and only the Plist knows? Or is there more Eliot influence that we don't?

[Mark Kohut]

Did Pynchon read Simone Weil influentially and only the Plist knows? Or is
there more Eliot influence that we don't?
More on grace sorta and other things.

So, I got my 1971 paperback edition--original 1952-- of Weil's The Need for
Roots down.
I seem to have read...some, a lot, of it, underlined, highlighted and all...

I did not remember that it had an introduction, same as in the 1952 first
English edition, from
Pynchon fave, T(ough) S(hit) Eliot.

"She had a very great soul to grow up to" [dead at 33] and her mind sorta
got there, although young, he virtually says. Interesting concept, no?

"I must affirm that there is no trace of the Protestant in her composition"
as she became a very critical Christian who refused Baptism.
These decades later I think of Pynchon seeing and trying to go beyond The
Protestant Ethic in graceful ways, so to get cute.

.." St. Thomas Aquinas (whom she dislikes, perhaps on insufficient
acquaintance)."  ......

.."something in common with those intellectuals of the present day (mostly
with a vague Protestant background) who can find their way toward
the religious life only thru the mysticism of the East."

....."dangerously close to those universalists who maintain that the
ultimate and esoteric truth is one"....

'We may protest that we are so completely in the dark as to what the world
would be like now if events had taken a different course."

..."her fundamental concept of *rootedness, *and her warnings of
 the evils of an overcentralized society."

.."a [nother] champion..of the oppressed and those oppressed by the
anonymous forces of modern society. [She actually worked in a car factory]

.."horrified by the *collectivity."..[*the mass? the state?] ...

"What she cared about was human souls."

Not Right, Not Left--I paraphrase--"this book belongs in that category of
prolegomena to politics which politicians seldom read."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180208/807c3f3b/attachment.html>