Weil’s unflagging appeal is in the way she calls us to the miracle of presence in lives beset by struggle. This practice of attention need not ask of all of us the sacrifice it asked of her, but it asks of us something.
Because I’d just read “The Bridge,” which I only half-understood, rendering it sacrosanct to my wide-eyed freshman mind, I’d taken Hart Crane at his word when he wrote in an essay that “Sincerity is essential to all real poetry.” Rilke said it earlier in his own letter-turned-rule-book for all young poets: “Describe your sorrows and desires,…
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