Weil published only articles, and no definitive interpretation of her thought exists. She lived a life of dedicated deprivation, finding a higher purpose in self-imposed affliction. She eventually starved herself to death in England as a kind of symbolic participation in French suffering during the Second World War, although she had also protested against herself being classified as Jewish. Her work was collected in Cahiers (3 volumes, 1951–6, trs. as The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1956). It is centred upon the eventual contradictory nature of rational thought, and the resulting need for the way of Platonic mysticism, in which the self becomes annihilated through unification with divine love.