Pascal began in the seventeenth century a quest that Simone Weil continued in the twentieth: searching and waiting (as Simone Weil put it) for God. For each of them it was both a personal and a public quest. In reaching into their own experience, they felt the need to reach out to that of others. This book is about that quest, both private and public, and the concerns which ensued from it: audience (who are they writing for?), intention (why are they writing?), and rhetoric (how are they writing what they have to say?).