Simone Weil on Destiny

It’s never been quite clear what poem Simone Weil is reading—it doesn’t seem to be The Iliad, or not one that other people read. Still, it must be a wonderful poem, and she has wonderful things to say about it:

The relations between the human soul and destiny; to what extent each soul may mould its own fate; what part in any and every soul is transformed by a pitiless necessity, by the caprice of variable fortune; what part of the soul, by means of virtue and grace, may remain whole—all these are a subject in which deception is easy and tempting. Pride, humiliation, hate, disdain, indifference, the wish to forget or to ignore—all these contribute toward that temptation. Particularly rare is a true expression of misfortune; in painting it one almost always affects to believe, first, that degradation is the innate vocation of the unfortunate; second, that a soul may suffer affliction without being marked by it, without changing all consciousness in a particular manner which belongs to itself alone. For the most part the Greeks had such strength of soul as preserved them from self-deception For this they were recompensed by knowing in all things how to attain the highest degree of lucidity, of purity and of simplicity.

—Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might,”
The Simone Weil Reader 153 at 181 (G. Panachis ed., 1977).