Foreword by Annie Finch

OF ALL MY FATHER'S INTENSE and wide-ranging intellectual passions, outlined by Martin Andic in the introduction to this collection, Simone Weil was the object of his most enduring and devoted study. And yet, although he began work on a book about Weil almost twenty years before his death, this is the first book of his writings about Weil to be published.

I like to think that in the years during which my father was writing books on Wittgenstein and other subjects, and postponing the long-planned assembly of a collection on Weil, he was developing the life-wisdom he would need to address Weil adequately. Although it would have been wonderful if he could have finished editing this collection himself, at least, by the time he began to put this book together in his last months of life, he had attained a level of serenity and insight beyond that which had been available to him earlier.

When my father finally resumed work on Weil, six months before his death from cancer, he was too weak to carry a pile of books by himself. I cleared away the many stacks of books and papers around his chair (with his characteristic sense of duty and honor, he had been finishing another manuscript, on the mystic Da Love-Ananda, that he had promised and felt obligated to write). Under his direction, I carried books and manuscripts about Weil and arranged them in piles on the tables in his study. He told me that the Weil book would be easy, since he had been carrying it around in his head for many years. He asked me to bring him a legal pad, and he began to write.

In the last weeks of his life, he was too weak to write himself and dictated the remaining essays to my mother and to a dedicated nurse named Elie Joseph Hercule. He was still working on this book the day before he died--on August 22, close to Simone Weil's own death-day. I told my father that I would get the Weil book published, and since I am a poet, not a philosopher, I was lucky that his devoted friend Martin Andic agreed to edit and introduce this collection, which impresses me anew with the vividness and intensity of my father's thinking. In conclusion, I offer the following elegy from my collection Calendars, a poem which I wrote for my father's memorial service.

VIGILS

In memory of Henry Leroy Finch, August 8, 1919-August 22, 1997

"Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze towards paradise."
  --Hart Crane, "Voyages"

"If a lion could talk, we couldn't understand him."
  --Ludwig Wittgenstein

Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves have not opened,
where night is reflected through decades of glass.
There is the nursery, there is the nanny,
there are my father's magnificent eyes
turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy?
His is the death that is circling the stars.

In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly
and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,
three of us are watching, one of us is staring
with the wide gaze of a wild sea-fed seal.
Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves,
and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass.
We wait outside time, while time collects courage
around us. The vigil is wordless. Once you

saw time pushing outward, that day in the nursery
when books first meant language, as your mother's voice
traced out the patterns of letters. You saw
words take their breath and the first circles open,
their space collapse inward. They sparkled. Your pen
would scratch ink deliberately, letters incised
like runemarks on stone as you heard, quoting patiently:
Wittgenstein, Gutkind, Gurdjieff, or Weil.

You watch the longest, move the furthest, deliberate in breath,
pulling into your body. You stare towards your death,
head arched on the pillow, your left fingers curled.
Your mouth sucking gently, unmoved by these hours
and their vigil of salt spray, you show us how far
you are going, and how long the long minutes are,
while spiralling night watches over the room
and takes you, until you watch us in turn.

He releases the pages. Here is the mail,
bringing books, gratitude, students, and poems.
Here are kites and the spinning of eternal tops,
icons, parades, monasteries and boardwalks,
gazebos, surprises, loons and unspeaking
silence. Pages again. The words come
like a scent from a flower. Geometry is clear.
Language is natural. The truth is not clever;

cats speak their own language. You are still breathing.
Here is release. Here is your pillow,
cool like a handkerchief pressed in a pocket.
Here is your white tousled long growing hair.
Here is a kiss on your temple to hold you
safe through your solitude's long steady war;
here, you can go. We will stay with you,
loud in the silence we all came here for.

Night, take his left hand, turning the pages.
Spin with the windows and doors that he mended.
Spin with his answers, patient, impatient.
Spin with his dry independence, his arms
warmed by the needs of his family, his hands
flying under the wide, carved gold ring, and the pages
flying so his thought could fly. His breath slows,
lending its edges out to the night.

Here is his open mouth. Silence is here
like a huge brand-new question that he wouldn't answer.
A leaf is his temple. He gazes alone.
He has given his body; his hand lies above
the sheets in a symbol of wholeness, a curve
of thumb and forefinger, ringed with wide gold,
and his face, which is sudden and beautiful, young
for an instant, is new in the light of the flame.