“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind
I’m at the wheel of my mother’s car with my elderly mother in the passenger seat. We are running errands and poking along on a six-laner through the vast sprawl of Jacksonville, Florida. The road is swarming with speeding traffic and afflicted on both sides with shopping malls, office parks, condominium developments, and warehouses.
Not long ago this land, like much of the Southeast, had been fields and farms and swamps. But the fields and farms and swamps had been filled in and paved over and built upon to capitalize on the swelling ranks of people of all ages moving here from all over the country as though at the end of a huge funnel. Around that time, the early 2000s, the Sunshine State’s population was growing at a rate about double the national average. My parents were just two among that multitude of transplants—in their case, retirees—many of whom surround us now.
“Where are we?” my mom asks apropos of nothing, while looking around at the maelstrom whizzing by in the glaring heat outside our air-conditioned car’s windows. I glance at her. Never a large woman, she appears smaller now on account of her years. And I swear she appears to be sinking into the oceanic, anonymous chaos all around us.
“What do you mean?” I ask. We’ve been on this road many times before. I say, “You know where we are.” I think, with a fright, that maybe she is losing her mind. Dementia, that’s what I’m thinking. Is this how it starts? Small slips of disorientation.
“Not like that,” she says. “I mean, what is this place?”
I feel her perplexity as my own. I feel “lost” here, too. Ungrounded. Uneasy. What is this place? We could be just about anywhere in the country; there are no defining features to indicate that we are anywhere unique. Where I live, in the Hudson Valley of New York, there’s the same scourge of urban and suburban sprawl. But the scale is smaller, more contained, and even easily avoidable if that’s something you want to do. There’s still plenty of nature around in which to seek solace. But not here. There’s no escape; you could drive for hours and still never find your way out of this same mind-numbing morass, drained of the natural world but for the ragged palmettos that occasionally dot the median strip that separates the opposing lanes of traffic.
Born in the Northeast, I spent most of my youth in an early American exurban pocket of Connecticut. Now, in the nearly 40 years that I’ve lived in the Hudson Valley, I’ve sown my own roots here among similar remnants of old architectures, storied histories, and bumpy, winding roads among which I was raised. I like it. I could even say I need it. And I’ve cherished living among the spirits of my ancestors on my mother’s side of the family who, as members of the Continental Army, fought the British in the Revolutionary War in these parts. My small house—a former gatehouse to a still-extant 19th-century Hudson Riverfront estate—is just a mile from a historic site and house that belonged to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He is entombed in the graveyard of the old stone church next door to me.
For most of their lives, my mother and father, too, lived in the Northeast. My guess is that in this moment my mother is not feeling rooted someplace or connected to anything meaningful in her life. I can almost feel as if we’re tumble weeds surrounded by more tumble weeds, all of us just blowing in the prevailing wind. With nothing around us now to remind her of where she’s from, of where her lineage fits into the nation’s history, perhaps it’s my mother’s ancestral memory that’s drawing a blank. Yet, she knows exactly where we are: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
I despair for her. She has reached an age when you want to feel secure in, and at ease with, your place in the universe—a feeling of being held, if you will, by family and friends—yet now she appears to feel more emotionally orphaned than I’ve ever noticed before. It is strange to think of your mother or father being orphaned. But how else to put it? There is no one they can count on for regular, familial support; nothing beyond the physical comfort they’d sought all of their adult lives and have now achieved. But gained at the expense, it turns out, of no longer feeling at home anywhere. Which is to say there are other ways to feel orphaned besides having no parents. And there are other ways to suffer the blight of homelessness besides not having a roof over your head.
It has been a long road getting here. My father spent his working life seeking promotions in order to earn more money so that he could buy ever-larger houses to accommodate our growing family. Sometimes we picked up stakes and moved not just across town but to other towns and, once, to another state. And these moves, I think, disrupted the bonds of neighbors and friends we’d all had forged individually and as a family—my parents, my three brothers, and I—wherever we had settled. We didn’t move a lot but we moved just enough—and perhaps at critical times in my and my siblings’ psychological development—to fracture our developing internal cohesion and sense of having any sort of solid ground beneath our feet or allegiance to place.
The moving had taken a toll on our familial bonds as well. Since 1973, when my father relocated us from our beloved home in Connecticut to accept an executive job running a struggling brass factory in Michigan, I can recall only two times when my parents and their four sons gathered under one roof for a family celebration or holiday. Which is to say that we’ve never been a close-knit family, in part because of how we grew up and in part because of where we all ended up, which may be a consequence of how we grew up.
While I’m in New York, I have a brother in Colorado and another brother in Michigan. We also had a brother in Maine, but in December of 2022, he died at age 65. (I wrote about that here.) He never married and moved several times in search of satisfying work in graphic design and advertising, and for a place where he might feel rooted, which turned out to be the Maine coast. It was there that he spent his final years living in a roughly finished, walk-out basement of a house owned by a cousin of ours in Cape Elizabeth, yet still the most lost and alienated among four brothers.
***
Simone Weil was a French philosopher who, during WWII, had been commissioned by General de Gaulle, head of France’s government in exile in London—Free France—to write a report on the duties and privileges of the French after their liberation. This report was intended to outline options for reviving France after an allied victory, which was imminent but still a year away. This report was published in book form in 1949 in French under the title of L’Eracinement, six years of Weil’s death in 1943. It was published in English in 1952 as The Need for Roots: A Prelude to a Declaration of the Duties of Mankind. In it, she writes:
“A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”
What Weil is saying here is that it’s not enough to feel rooted to a particular place or to the community in which we’ve found ourselves. We also need to feel rooted to a shared history, to a common language, to a moral standard, to our work, to obligations, to some sort of spiritual life. She believed France was suffering from this lack of roots both before and during the war and wrote in The Need for Roots what she believed would help get France back on its feet.
I’m writing about this now because it appears to me that there are certain aspects regarding what happened in France before and during the Nazi occupation that are similar to what we have faced in this country before and during another kind of occupation—an insidious amalgamation of communism and chaos and corruption—which boiled over the bounds of common decency during the unfathomably fraudulent Biden regime, an occupation that sought—and to a great degree temporarily succeeded—in the decimation of so much our country that Weil also lamented had happened in France. Both countries suffered from a malady of uprootedness that weakened both individual and collective resilience and left them open for an invasion.
But, just as there are similarities, there are also differences between the Nazi occupation of France and the despotic occupation in America over the past several years. One is that it was usually obvious during the occupation of France who the adversaries were. For one thing, they’d come from another country and spoke another language. And they wore uniforms. During the occupation of this country, the conspirators were—and remain—not so obvious. The Luciferian operatives of the current occupation gathered their conscripts from tens of millions of ordinary Americans who had—and continue to have—no idea of the breadth and depth of the occupation of which they are a part. Nor do they have any inkling about its intention or how long it has been slowly infiltrating every nook and cranny of American life. As a result, this occupation has had on all of us a far more destructive ideological force than America has ever faced from a foreign invader.
What began, for example, in the 1990s in the stealth fog of “political correctness” in America, has mutated into our current monstrous “cancel culture” and gaslighting. “The tag itself, I have come to realize, creates a linguistic cul-de-sac where we just park our brains,” writes Diana West in her brilliant 2013 opus, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. “‘PC’ is, gosh, ‘PC.’ We look no further. Sure, the acronym, ‘PC’—’political correctness’—conveys the idea that something is phony, forced, and ideologically, not logically, inspired, but it doesn’t advertise its bona fide totalitarian provenance in the language of ideology, which, once accepted, once internalized, draws an individual into that ideological pact with the devil in which reasoning powers are lost. [Italics mine.] In other words, ‘PC’ is just another label for Big Lies—little lies, too. It describes the systematic suppression of fact that advances and sustains the ideology of the State and its barricades in academia, media, and other cultural outposts.”
Weil might have naively flirted with the Big Lies and little lies of the State totalitarian ideologies of her time, which then—as now—was embodied in communism. After all, it was de rigueur among the so-called intellectuals in France—the likes of leftists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—lingering over glasses of Burgundy in smokey Parisienne cafes in the 1930s and 1940s. But Weil eventually learned how foolish Karl Marx’s idea was about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” leading to a more egalitarian if not utopian civilization.
In The Need for Roots, she called Marxism “a completely outlandish doctrine.” Robert Coles in his 1987 portrait of Weil, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, writes, “She knew how unlikely, how absurd such a notion was. She knew, morally, what ought to be, but she knew as a slave, as a brilliant slave, how oppressive force is on anyone’s life, and on society.” All anyone had to do to learn about the abject failures of Marxism was to dig a little and find out what was happening under Josef Stalin’s murderous hand in the U.S.S.R. not all that far as the crow flies from those glasses of Burgundy in those smokey cafes. But then, like now, there’s mysteriously little motivation among certain people—most people, I’m beginning to learn—to acknowledge the truth if it compromises or challenges their ideology.
Not so Simone Weil. Coles writes: “The Need for Roots, with its sketches of a postwar world, a France of her dreams, she not only used the metaphor of rootedness; she tried to spell out ‘the needs of the soul’ if an undermining, disheartening uprootedness were not to develop. Her recitation of those needs amounts to a remarkable conservative manifesto, a powerful statement on her part with respect to politics and social institutions.” He goes on to say that Weil “detested the proudly amoral or value-free partisans of the liberal and radical intelligentsia.”
In his preface to the first English translation of the book, published in 1952, T.S. Eliot writes that “she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.” He goes on to say that Weil was “by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity—the monster created by modern totalitarianism. What she cared about was human souls.”
Here, so successful was the complicit mainstream media in getting vast swaths of the American population to go along with the big and little lies of the totalitarian ideology of the State in our times, which came to head with the COVID-19 psyop, that the complete conquest of America was at hand. And it was not happening through any sort of armed conflict, but rather via government orchestrated, insidious pathways into the mind through widespread censorship and narrative control, and all of it dominated by fear. Tens of millions of American minds had been captured and convinced that anyone—people like me and perhaps like you, too—who have done what we could to stand in the way of this tyrannical takeover, perhaps only by asserting our right to refuse the toxic COVID-19 jabs—had become, at the flick of a switch, the enemy.
And all it took was a complicit media to spin the lies big and little, a phenomenon of which Weil, too, was well aware. She writes in The Need for Roots:
“We all know that when journalism becomes indistinguishable from organized lying, it constitutes a crime. But we think it is a crime impossible to punish. What is there to stop the punishment of activities once they are recognized to be criminal ones? Where does this strange notion of nonpunishable crimes come from? It constitutes one of the most monstrous deformations of the judicial spirit.”
***
The Nazi occupation of France had begun in May 1940 when France was invaded by German forces. The occupation ended in Paris in August 1944. By the latter part of that year, all of France was free. So, Weil was writing during the occupation while she was living in London, itching to get back to France to fight with the French Resistance, but unable to do so because of her failing health—she struggled with poor health throughout her life and was tormented by migraines—which might have been exacerbated during her brief involvement in 1936 on the harsh battlefields of Spain while fighting with the Republican forces against Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War.
One time on the front along Spain’s Ebro River, Weil, nearsighted and clumsy by nature, accidentally stepped into a large vat of hot cooking oil. In her biography of Weil, Simone Pétrement writes in Simone Weil: A Life of her and her fellow soldiers:
“They were still bivouacked in the bushes, on the right bank of the Ebro. They had started a fire in order to cook their meal in a hole dug in the ground, so as to screen any flames that might have given their position away. A huge pot or frying pan had been place at ground level over this fire of covered coals. Simone did not see it and put her foot right into the boiling oil. Her foot was protected by her boot but the lower part of her left leg and the instep were seriously burned.”
There is no telling what Weil might have accomplished had she joined the Resistance in France instead of writing in London. She was given an office on her own but never intended to give up her intention to get back to France to take on more dangerous missions. What we do know is that whatever dedication and energy she might have poured into the Resistance movement in France, she gave to her writing in London. “She was boiling with ideas,” writes Pétrement. “The sheer amount of what she wrote in London in a few months is almost beyond belief. She must have written day and night, scarcely taking the time to sleep. More than once she spent the entire night in her office, where she voluntarily locked herself in.”
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