The suspension of our thought, Weil declares, leaves us “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.”17 To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds.

As Weil observed, “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.”

We are always already social creatures, our selves formed and informed by the community into which we are born and in which we are raised. There is, quite simply, no self without society.

Work, in contrast, is the business of, well, one’s hands: when they engage the world, hands are the extension of one’s thoughts. Rather than being acted upon by the world, which is the lot of the laborer, the skilled worker shapes, with thought and deliberation, the material she finds in the world—an insight that also applies to the intellectual

The idea of collectivity resembles Hannah Arendt’s later notion of “thoughtlessness,” the condition she associated with Adolph Eichmann.

Herein lies one of her enduring insights: true resistance begins with clear thinking. As thinking creatures, we are incapable of accepting servitude. But true thinking cultivates moderation, not excess.

You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it . . . that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.”

In the opening lines of her first letter, Weil set the tone: “I am tired of talking to you about myself, for it is a wretched subject, but I am obliged to do so by the interest you take in me as a result of your charity.”12

Reverence is the work of attention. In fact, reverence is attention.