Gravity and Grace
Simon Weil. Book #114/200 on the Mandorla 200.
The Mandorla 200 is a reading-writing project I started on Instagram in 2018:
“Micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less.”
Here’s book #114, Gravity and Grace (1952), a posthumously published work of curated journals from the French philosopher-mystic-activist who Albert Camus once called “the only great spirit of our time.” Waiting for God (1950) has also been recommended to me. Okay, here’s my 200-word lyrical seed packet for you…
(114/200) You are a living contradiction. Wake up in a hero simulation. Auto-subscribe to the hardfoolery design of a life you believe to be distinctly yours, but it’s a delusion to think your self-will alone engines life. Following this fractioned gravity, materialist personality speed-dating, such drives keep you from full alliance with Grace, the purest form of generosity. Instead, know that fierce attention to the larger-than-self can be a prayer to the eternal, to a nowness enveloped in love so total we mostly don’t trust it, averting our gaze to opt for smaller ways of being. But what if we committed to becoming nobody? What about anonymizing our seeing? What about devoting every single blink to an attention so liquidating of the Self so as to demand residence in the whole, no longer stuck in life’s perceived contradictions and binaries, but instead gulping joy and suffering with equal measure? True humility: the rejection of ever living outside this divine field, to choose life as a poetics of union, we, the intermediaries of transcendent care extending to everyone, the impossible all, to unfix from our puckered unit and saturate in the full-bleed beauty, the aesthetic of universal incarnate.
The Book: Gravity and Grace (1952)
The Author: Simon Weil
The Publisher: Bison Books | University of Nebraska Press
The Tip: The Marginalian | David James Duncan