There is no question here of assessing the historical sources of her thought and the influences which may have affected her. Apart from the Gospel which was her daily spiritual food, she had a deep veneration for the great Hindu and Taoistic writings, for Homer, the Greek tragedies and above all for Plato, whom she interpreted in a fundamentally Christian manner. On the other hand she hated Aristotle, whom she regarded as the first to prepare a grave for the mystical tradition. Saint John of the Cross in the religious order, and Shakespeare, certain English mystical poets and Racine in the literary one, also left their mark on her mind. Among her contemporaries I can only think of Paul Valéry, and of Koestler in the Spanish Testament, of which she spoke to me with unmixed praise. Both her preferences and her dislikes were abrupt and final. She firmly believed that creation of real genius required a high level of spirituality and that it was impossible to attain to perfect expression without having passed through severe inner purgation. This insistence upon inner purity and authenticity made her pitiless for all the authors in whom she thought she could detect the slightest affectation, the slightest hint of insincerity or self-importance—Corneille, Hugo or Nietzsche for instance. For her the only thing that counted was a style stripped bare of all adornment, the perfect expression of the naked truth of the soul. “The effort of expression,” she wrote to me, “has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression is not attained, the thought has not touched or even come near to true greatness. . . The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down.”

(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Introduction by Gustave Thibon, 1952)

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge Classics 2002, translated by Emma Crawfold and Marion von der Ruhr)

Second Letter

Writing sometimes begins with fascination. Writing is worth pursuing only when it begins with fascination. Fascination is the only just cause or legitimate excuse for writing, and fascination is, by nature, something unreasonable or unjustifiable. Since our mind does not recognize or accept anything without reason, we might as well say that fascination is an effect that brings about its cause following its occurrence, and this is unacceptable to the human mind. But, alas, fascination has no cause other than writing; that is to say, writing is the true cause of fascination.

To put it another way, fascination is the efficient cause (i.e., the initial stimulus) of writing, and writing is the ultimate cause of fascination. Why? Perhaps because fascination is a form of infatuation that can’t identify its own cause. As soon as you find out why you have been fascinated, your fascination will be over. Yet since you don’t know the reason, you’re still fascinated; you’re obsessed with finding the cause of your fascination. And since there’s no way for you to track down the cause of your fascination, you have no other choice but to write. So you write to find the cause of something that doesn’t seem to have a cause [in the first place], and therefore keep on writing to find/create the underlying cause of your fascination; the cause of the cause of your writing, so to say. Nowhere can you find the cause, [however]. Your writing is in fact the cause of your fascination, and your ongoing attempts to write testify to your ongoing fascination. And so long as there is a force in you that urges you to write, you are a fascinated person; someone who writes from fascination. In essence, other forms of writing don’t do justice to writing. Every form of writing is in effect a letter. Emily Dickinson described her poems as letters she wrote to a world, from which she might never receive an answer, or which may never read her letter-poems or, to put it another way, constantly postpone reading them.

So the second letter: a letter about one of the means (or causes?) of writing. I was once fascinated with a woman. Her name was Simone. I hadn’t read anything by her. I haven’t read anything by her even now. I only read things about her. I once translated an article by another woman. A famous woman. Very famous indeed. Susan Sontag. A short article about a woman of whom I didn’t know much. Perhaps I didn’t know anything at all. I still don’t know much. Susan had written that about Simone. Susan had also quoted Simone in an article about Bresson’s cinema; it was a moving quote. A quote about the relation between grace and the void. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” Simone Weil’s book was titled Gravity and Grace. It said, “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”

It didn’t matter. Yet it did. But not because of my fascination with Simone. I’d been fascinated with Simone and yet didn’t know the reason; this was all that mattered. So I needed to write. I have written or translated many things since then. But there were more things that I didn’t write than I did. There were plenty of letters that I didn’t write. Plenty of stories. Plenty of texts. Those texts were maybe, fortunately not written down. In the life of every writer, a moment comes when they decide to write about things they have always wished to commit to paper, to write about the unwritten. So the second letter; a letter about all the letters you have always wished to write to a woman, who had passed away two years before your father came into the world and with whom you were fascinated. Perhaps because of the glasses she always wore, without which she would have looked more beautiful than many other women, without which she would no longer be Simone, because she would no longer be able to write; or perhaps because of her radiant smile, without which your heart would sink, wondering why this woman, who you don’t know, why you are fascinated with all the moments you could have spent with her, isn’t smiling…

I need to write about this woman, about Simone. I need to write about Simone so I can find out why I can’t write. I need to find out why all the letters I have had to write to this woman still remain unwritten. I need to write to find out why there always remains a point that escapes me in the letter, and since it does, the letter is written and sent, and the person who is supposed to read it looks high and low for that one point and doesn’t seem to find it. You have already sent the letter, you can never write to someone to whom you have already written, and ask them to send back your previous letter so that you can add a point which remains unwritten. You can’t write that point in the following letters either, or in any other letters for that matter. The point should have resided in the letter you have already sent; there is a void; there must be a void. And remain so. Simone says, “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

23 June 2017