Lady Bird

What a great film! I was thinking about trying to write something about it and love and attention and possibly Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, but Vox has beaten me to it. (Spoiler alert: there are no Iris Murdoch references.) Here's the beginning of their review:

The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote often of attention as a kind of spiritual discipline. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she wrote in her notebooks, an idea she later would continue to develop, eventually concluding that attention “presupposes faith and love.”

In a Q&A following a festival screening of her masterful solo directorial debut Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig quoted Weil, and it’s clear from the film that this spirit of faith, love, generosity, and attention animates the whole endeavor. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age film starring the great Saoirse Ronan as Christine — or “Lady Bird,” as she’s re-christened herself — and it’s as funny, smart, and filled with yearning as its heroine. Lady Bird is an act of attention, and thus love, from Gerwig, not just toward her hometown of Sacramento but also toward girlhood, and toward the feeling of always being on the outside of wherever real life is happening.

Some films seem designed to make you fall in love with one or more of their characters, or the people who play them. Lady Bird is like that, except what you fall in love with is not Saoirse Ronan or the character she plays but growing up itself, or the tenderness of youth and family, the pain of forming as an individual and separating from your parents, and the sweetness of forming as an individual and never separating from your parents. I haven't nearly cried so many times about so many different kinds of thing at any movie I can remember.

Simone Weil on philosophy as poetry

I think this will only be available for a limited time, so if you haven't seen it yet I recommend looking at this incomplete essay by Simone Weil.

Abstract:

In response to Paul Valéry's claim that “philosophy is poetry,” Simone Weil set out to examine the nature of philosophical thinking. She argues that it is above all concerned with value. In the course of her argument, she lays out the grammatical differences between thinking about value, and other epistemological endeavours. These differences mean that inconsistencies are not to be avoided in philosophy, and that philosophy is not a matter of system building. In the end, she also believes that thinking philosophically requires one to possess the value of detachment, and hence a readiness to be transformed.