Simone Weil sought to turn her life into poetry. To live - to be willing to die - as the leader of a cadre of frontline nurses in occupied territory. This was in January 1943 - arriving in London from the USA where she escaped occupied France with her parents, it is physical danger she craves, to be parachuted behind enemy lines, or to care for the wounded in the thick of battle. Instead - what disappointment! - she is found clerical work for the Free French organisation.

Still, over the next four months, she finds time to write some of the work for which she is most famous - reflecting on theology and religion, translating sections of the Upanishads, analysing Marxism; 800 pages spring forth from her pen. At the same time, she reflects on force - her abiding concern - reading advanced mathematics and physics. Alexander Irwin, from whom this account is drawn, writes:

The manuscripts show that Weil's handwriting flowed with an almost supernatural steadiness, rapidity, and assurance in this period: page after page streaming out virtually without hesitations or corrections. She often worked around the clock, staying through the night in the office in Hill street or walking home long after the last Underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently.

The force and substance of her life were poured in an almost literal way into the writing that filled her notebooks, in a procedure reminiscent of the transmutations and requalifications of matter and energy on which she speculated obsessively in her metaphysical texts. The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprising only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

Weil is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Hospitalised, though refusing the treatment that might help her, she undertakes to eat only as much as those rationed in France. She dies on August 24th, 1943.