“Simone Weil is always moving in a single direction because she is always searching for a single thing”— and this thing is nothing if not the center of gravity in any given situation, which for her can only be of a spiritual nature, however violently it may erupt into action. Like her spiritual masters, the Greeks, what interests Weil in a tragic event is principally action: not as an occurrence, and still less as psychology, but as the eruption, the extreme projection, of a consciousness: action that is, so to speak, “immobile.” Or to use her own words: “Action would be like a language. As works of art, etc. On the stage—the slow maturation of an act, with the universe around—then the act rushed into the world.”引自第261页It is always a matter of the most total and irreparable misfortune: the misfortune of being uprooted.引自第265页“To arrive at understanding absolutely that things and persons exist. To achieve this, even just once before I die, is the only grace that I ask.”
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The importance of the existence of a work like Venice Saved—and our capacity for comprehending its parables—will not be lost on anyone who nowadays still tries to live, as much as possible, at the level of attention that Simone Weil advocated: the level where problems rediscover their center and the barriers erected by nonexistent values fall away.引自第266页For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play.
If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.引自第268页Only one thing is certain: Richard II is the telltale pause that declares the first great experiences of the soul. Everything in this pause is eloquent—the scarceness and austerity of the images, all subjected to the greatest spiritual tension; the unusual sense of time, mercilessly and minutely measured by the verse; and above all the attempt, which is even more unusual considering this is Shakespeare, to keep everything within the confines of the purest sorrow.引自第274页No less, and perhaps more, than the Sonnets themselves, Richard II’s fall bears witness to Shakespeare’s noche oscura—that compulsory passage in human existence through moral violence out of which, dead or alive, a new man cannot but emerge. That the tragic emotional parable of the Sonnets is begun during this same period in Shakespeare’s life may mean a great deal or very little. The report of the death—also around this time—of Hamnet Shakespeare, his twelve-year-old son, or the story of Shakespeare leaving London to retire, at the age of thirty-two and at the height of his adventure in acting, to the small town of Stratford may also mean a great deal or very little. The one thing we know for certain is that the violence was converted into suffering, and that the suffering divinely blossomed into love.引自第275页
