To the Brink of Death

W.'s been reading a life of Simone Weil with great envy, he says, sending me this passage:

… 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 on Hill Street or walking home after the last underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently[….] The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprisingly only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

When will we discover the rhythm that will let us, too, work like maniacs? When that steady pressure that will make every day a work day, every day launched with a forward push from the day before …