Attention as the rarest form of generosity, affliction as a thing you can think clearly about, and a philosopher who went to work in the factory to check.
Simone Weil (1909–1943) trained in philosophy and then took a year of factory work, because she did not believe you could write about labour honestly without doing it. What she wrote afterwards about affliction — a suffering that takes the self apart rather than ennobling it — is unlike almost anything else in the tradition.
Her writing on attention is the part that travels furthest: attention as an act of giving rather than of taking, and the rarest kind of generosity there is. Most of her work was published after her death, from notebooks. She died at thirty-four.