Simone Weil

Reading at the Threshold

There are books that aren’t simply read — they read us. Books that don’t arrive to be understood, but to remain within us, in silence. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil is one of those.

It isn’t a treatise. It isn’t a theological summa. It is the notebook of a soul on the edge. Simone Weil did not write to convince anyone — not even to explain herself. She wrote —as one prays— on her knees. What we find here are fragments, aphorisms, flashes of clarity and abyss. There is no system, but there is an invisible architecture: that of a soul trying to vanish so that something —Someone— might dwell in it.

We live under the law of gravity: of ego, desire, suffering, of a world that imposes itself. But Weil reminds us that there is another force: silent, undeserved, unconditional — grace. It cannot be demanded. It can only be awaited in nakedness, in pure attention, in dispossession.

Gravity and Grace doesn’t comfort. It doesn’t soothe. But it reveals. And in doing so, it leaves a crack through which a light enters that can no longer be ignored.

I begin here a series of brief entries — readings, echoes, perhaps prayers — drawn from this book. Not to explain it, but to remain with it a little longer. So that, perhaps, something that passes through it might pass through us as well.

Because as Weil wrote:
“To accept that necessity is what it is — that is faith. Gravity is not an illusion. But it is not everything.”