Those approaching Ashford from the west by car, going along the A20, once the main route from London before the M20 was completed in the 1990s, will come to a large roundabout. Straight ahead, the direction goes into the town itself. But the second exit runs along beside an international hotel and a shopping centre towards the road off to Canterbury.
Since 1983 this has been called Simone Weil Avenue. A somewhat underwhelming sign by the road commemorates its naming. The other side of the motorway which carves its way across the landscape is Bybrook cemetery, accessible just after a garden centre. At the edge of this, a small tablet in the part of the plot reserved for Catholics marks the burial place of Simon Weil, the French philosopher, mystic and writer, who had died at the age of 34 during the Second World War in 1943 while a member of the Free French resistance movement in the UK.
Born in Paris, and a brilliant mathematician in her school days, Weil gravitated to philosophy and a unique brand of mysticism after experiences as a teacher, and then fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Her fusion of living and thinking and the attempt to put this into practice in her life meant that, though wholly unconnected to him, she followed the path of her contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein and at one point wholly renounced intellectual environments to work as an agricultural labourer (he was to famously work as a hospital porter at Guys, London, during the war).
Weil’s work is austere and uncompromising, but it has gathered a passionate and widespread admiring following. In one of her most celebrated works `The Needs of the Soul’ (possibly partially written in the last months of her life, partly while in Ashford in 1943) she had declared that `punishment is a vital need of the human soul.’ She continued:
`There are two kinds of punishment, disciplinary and penal. The former offers security against failings with which it would be too exhausting to struggle if there were no exterior support. But the most indispensable punishment for the soul is that inflicted for crime. By committing crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back together; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part.’ (`Simone Weil: An Anthology’, ed Sian Miles, Penguin reissue 2005, London, 122-3).
The ways in which Weil articulated an almost masochistic mysticism mean her work is an acquired taste. `Disgust’, she wrote, `in all its forms is one of the most precious trials sent to man as a ladder by which to rise. I have a very large share of this favour. We have to turn all our disgust into a disgust for ourselves’ (Ibid,179). She herself found working for the Free French in London frustrating because of the solely intellectual nature of the work she was given. Free French leader Charles De Gaulle apparently thought, after reading one of her pieces, that she was mad. One of her final works, `Reflections on Rebellion’ was, according to Miles, `the only work of hers that de Gaulle could be persuaded to read in toto.’ (Ibid, 56). This contains proposals for a revised constitution in France after the war was over and the allies victorious, in which a much more internationalist approach was taken – stressing the obligations that flow from rights, rather than the freedoms that arise from them, and the need to recognise this in a more unitary framework of governance, where political parties and even sovereign governments were constructed to avoid division and conflict rather than be almost ontologically fated to exacerbate these. Her thinking in part formed the inspiration for those working on the vision for European unity in the early 1950s – Jean Monet and Robert Schuman in particular.
After returning to Britain from visiting her family, then residing in the US, she was advised in mid 1943 to recuperate due to feeling exhausted and run down. In early august, she was moved to Grosvenor Sanitorium, Kennington, Ashford. She died there on the 24th of the same month. Controversy continues over the reason for her demise. Her death certificate stated heart failure, with the assumption that this was brought on by self-starvation. She herself was reputed to have only accepted the food rations which would have been the same as those involved in the war struggle in France. Perhaps it is the poignancy not so much of the way in which she died, but the circumstances too, so young, and with so much that she would have gone on to achieve. Even so, her influence was to show itself in figures as diverse as Albert Camus, T S Eliot, and Post John Paul the Second.
Weil’s stay in Ashford was very brief. It is moving that she is buried there. The place in which she died, Grosvenor Hall, had been built in the 19th century, and converted to a treatment centre for patients with tuberculosis in the First World War. In the 1950s it was changed from a sanitorium to a training centre, and today continues as an educational and recreational centre. fi