THE NOTEBOOKS OF SIMONE WEIL (2 Vols., 648 pp.)Translated by Arthur WillsPutnam ($10).
How does one get the reputation of a saint in the 20th century? Outside the Roman Catholic Church, where such things are regulated with almost civil-service precision, saintly works are not enough, and miracles are not required. What seems to be necessary is a sort of rapport with the time's intellectual torments, a capacity for drilling and painfully hitting some universal nerve. That, apparently, is the special gift of Simone Weil, a Frenchwoman who died in 1943 at 34 and who...