Simone Weil FIRST AND LAST NOTEBOOKS Translated by Richard ReesOxford University Pres, Ely Host, London Wr Footnotes Richard Rees 1970 CONTENTS Introduction I Pre-War Notebook, 1933-(?)1939 IL Prologue TIL New York Notebook, 1942 IV_ London Notebook, 1943, PLATES Betaeen pages 58-59 I. Front cover of Pre-War Notebook II Back cover of Pre-War Notebook (Both photographs by courtesy of LiINTRODUCTION ‘The firs section of this book consists of Simone Weil's pre-war notebook, which was not published in France until 1970. It was apparently begun in 1933 and continued intermittently up to 1939, but she does not seem to have taken it with her to Spain in 1936, nor on her subsequent travels in Italy. The remainder of the book consists of the notes she wrote in America and England in 1942 and 1943, the last pages being written in hospital just before her death, The transitional passage, ‘Prologue’! must have been written before she left France for America in May 1942, since it was found among the papers she ibon on her departure. ‘The notebooks written by Simone Weil in France in 1940-2 have already appeared in English? and with the present volume the English translation of all her published notebooks is completed. It is obvious that the notes were mostly written swith a view (o future use in books, though some of them are in a kind of intellectual shorthand that she would have had to expand. On the cover of the pre-war notebook, however, she ‘This notebook doesn’t count.” She presumably meant by this that not all of it necessarily represented her final con- sidered opinion. But it is difficult to guess what passages in it she would have omitted or altered before publishing them, “Much of it was written in r935-4, when she was teaching at the Dyote for girls at Roanne and was engaged upon her long essay, ‘Reflections on the causes of liberty and social oppression’. She was only in her middle twenties at the time, but her profound and comprehensive sense of responsibility is already fully developed and her preoccupations seem perfectly continuous and consistent with those in the notebooks that she began to write seven years later. They also reveal an extraordinary intellectual and emotional maturity, considering her age at the 2 te included with the New York and London notebooks in the volume, La Camaisecesunaarle(Galizara, 1950). TT Noteecks of Simane Wail, 2 vel. (Routledge, 1958)