Notes from a Room

To Joë Bousquet
(Marseille, 12 May 1942)

Joë Bousquet was permanently paralysed as the result of a wound in the First World War. Simone Weil had sent him her Plan for an Organization of Front-Line Nurses, and he had replied with a letter of commendation, of which she hoped to make use.

Cher ami,

First of all, thank you for what you have just done for me. If your letter is effective, as I hope, you will have done it not for me but for others through me – for your younger brothers who should be infinitely dear to you, since the same fate has struck them. Perhaps some of them will owe to you, just before the moment of death, the solace of an exchange of sympathy.

You are specially privileged in that the present state of the world is a reality for you. Perhaps even more so than for those who at this moment are killing and dying, wounding and being wounded, because they are taken unawares, without knowing where they are or what is happening to them; and, like you in your time, they are unable to think thoughts appropriate to their situation.

As for the others – the people here, for example – what is happening is a confused nightmare for some of them (though very few), and for the majority it is a vague background, like a theatrical drop-scene. In either case, it is unreal.

But you, on the other hand, for twenty years you have been repeating in thought that destiny which seized and then released so many men, but which seized you permanently – and which now returns again to seize millions of men. You, I repeat, are now really equipped to think it. Or if you are still not quite ready – as I think you are not – you have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth.

It is a very ancient image. The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love – the Love which is God himself, and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.

The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is – unconfused by perspective. Compared to what it is inside the egg, space has become an infinity to the second or rather the third power.

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence – not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation. It is the secret word, the word of Love, who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

You, once you have emerged from the shell, will know the reality of war – which is the most precious reality to know, because war is unreality itself. To know the reality of war is the Pythagorean harmony, the unity of opposites; it is the plenitude of knowledge of the real.

That is why you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body, waiting for years in patient fidelity until you are ripe to know it. Those who fell beside you did not have time to collect their thought from its frivolous wandering and focus it upon their destiny. And those who came back unwounded have all killed their past by oblivion – even if they have seemed to remember it – because war is affliction, and it is as easy to direct one’s thought voluntarily towards affliction as it would be to persuade an untrained dog to walk into a fire and let itself be burnt.

To think affliction, it is necessary to bear it in one’s flesh, driven very far in like a nail, and for a long time, so that thought may have time to grow strong enough to regard it – to regard it from outside, having succeeded in leaving the body and even, in a sense, the soul as well.

Body and soul remain not only pierced through but nailed down at a fixed point. Whether or not affliction imposes literal immobility, there is always enforced immobility – in the sense that a part of the soul is always steeped, monotonously, incessantly, and inextricably, in pain.

Thanks to this immobility, the infinitesimal seed of divine love placed in the soul can slowly grow and bear fruit in patience – the divinely beautiful Gospel expression. Translators say in patientia, but hypomonē is quite another thing. It means to remain where one is, motionless, in expectation, unshaken and unmoved by any external shock.

Fortunate are those in whom the affliction which enters their flesh is the same one that afflicts the world itself in their time. They have the opportunity and the function of knowing the truth of the world’s affliction and contemplating its reality. And that is the redemptive function itself. Twenty centuries ago, in the Roman Empire, slavery was the affliction of the age, and crucifixion was its extreme expression.

But alas for those who have this function and do not fulfil it. When you say that you do not feel the difference between good and evil, your words are not serious if taken literally, because you are speaking of another man in you who is clearly the evil in you. You are well aware – or, when there is any doubt, a careful scrutiny can nearly always dispel it – which of your thoughts, words, and deeds strengthen that other man in you at your expense, and which ones strengthen you at his.

What you mean is that you have not yet consented to recognize this difference as the distinction between good and evil.

It is not an easy consent to give, because it commits one irrevocably. There is a kind of virginity in the soul as regards good, which is lost forever once the soul has given this consent – just as a woman’s virginity is lost after she has yielded to a man. The woman may become unfaithful, adulterous, but she will never again be a virgin. So she is frightened when she is about to yield. Love triumphs over this fear.

For every human being there is a point in time, a limit, unknown to anyone and above all to himself, but absolutely fixed, beyond which the soul cannot keep this virginity. If, before this precise moment (fixed from all eternity), it has not consented to be possessed by the good, it will immediately afterwards be possessed in spite of itself by the bad.

A man may yield to the bad at any moment of his life, because he yields to it unconsciously and unaware that he is admitting an external authority into his soul; and before surrendering her virginity to it, the soul drugs herself with an opiate. To be possessed by the bad, it is not necessary to have consented to it; but the good never possesses the soul until she has said yes.

And such is the fear of consummating the union that no soul has the power to say yes to the good unless she is urgently constrained by the almost immediate approach of the time-limit which will decide her eternal fate. For one man, this time-limit may occur at the age of five, for another at the age of sixty. In any case, neither before nor after it has been reached is it possible to locate it temporally; in the sphere of duration, this instantaneous and eternal choice can only be seen refracted.

For those who have yielded to the bad a long time before the limiting moment is reached, this moment is no longer real. The most a human being can do is to guard intact his faculty for saying yes to the good, until the time when the limiting moment has almost been reached.

It appears to me certain that for you this limiting moment has not yet arrived. I lack the power to read men’s hearts, but it seems to me that there are signs that it is not far distant. Your faculty for consent is certainly intact.

I think that when you have consented to the good you will break the shell – after an interval perhaps, but doubtless a short one – and the moment you are outside it, there will be pardon for that bullet which once pierced the centre of your body, and thus also for the whole universe which drove it there.

The intelligence has a part in preparing the nuptial consent to God. It consists in looking at the evil in oneself and hating it. Not trying to get rid of it, but simply descrying it and keeping one’s eyes fixed upon it until one feels repulsion – even before one has said yes to its opposite.

I believe that the root of evil – in everybody perhaps, but certainly in those whom affliction has touched, and above all if the affliction is biological – is day-dreaming. It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted; the one solace to help them bear the fearful burden of time; and a very innocent one, besides being indispensable. So how could it be possible to renounce it?

It has only one disadvantage, which is that it is unreal. To renounce it for the love of truth is really to abandon all one’s possessions in a mad excess of love and to follow him who is the personification of Truth. And it is really to bear the cross; because time is the cross.

While the limiting moment is still remote, it is not necessary to do this; but it is necessary to recognize day-dreaming for what it is. And even while one is sustained by it, one must never forget for a moment that in all its forms – those that seem most inoffensive by their childishness, those that seem most respectable by their seriousness and their connection with art or love or friendship – in all its forms without exception, it is falsehood. It excludes love. Love is real.

I would never dare to speak to you like this if all these thoughts were the product of my own mind. But although I am unwilling to place any reliance on such impressions, I do really have the feeling, in spite of myself, that God is addressing all this to you, for love of you, through me. In the same way, it does not matter if the consecrated host is made of the poorest quality flour — not even if it is three parts rotten.

You say that I pay for my moral qualities by distrust of myself. But my attitude towards myself, which is not distrust but a mixture of contempt and hatred and repulsion, is to be explained on a lower level — on the level of biological mechanisms.

For twelve years I have suffered from pain around the central point of the nervous system, the meeting-place of soul and body; this pain persists during sleep and has never stopped for a second. For a period of ten years it was so great, and was accompanied by such exhaustion, that the effort of attention and intellectual work was usually almost as despairing as that of a condemned man the day before his execution — and often much more so, for my efforts seemed completely sterile and without even any temporary result.

I was sustained by the faith, which I acquired at the age of fourteen, that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result, either direct or indirect. Nevertheless, a time came when I thought my soul menaced, through exhaustion and an aggravation of the pain, by such a hideous and total breakdown that I spent several weeks in anguished uncertainty whether death was not my imperative duty — although it seemed to me appalling that my life should end in horror. As I told you, I was only able to calm myself by deciding to live conditionally, for a trial period.

A little earlier, when I had already been for years in this physical state, I worked for nearly a year in engineering factories in the Paris region. The combination of personal experience and sympathy for the wretched mass of people around me — in which I formed, even in my own eyes, an undistinguishable item — implanted so deep in my heart the affliction of social degradation that I have felt a slave ever since, in the Roman sense of the word.

During all this time, the word God had no place at all in my thoughts. It never had, until the day — about three and a half years ago — when I could no longer keep it out. At a moment of intense physical pain, while I was making the effort to love (although believing I had no right to give any name to the love), I felt — while completely unprepared for it (I had never read the mystics) — a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a human being; it was inaccessible both to sense and to imagination, and it resembled the love that irradiates the tenderest smile of somebody one loves.

Since that moment, the name of God and the name of Christ have been more and more irresistibly mingled with my thoughts.

Until then, my only faith had been the Stoic amor fati as Marcus Aurelius understood it — to love the universe as one’s city, one’s native country, the beloved fatherland of every soul; to cherish it for its beauty, in the total integrity of the order and necessity which are its substance, and all the events that occur in it.

The result was that the irreducible quantity of hatred and repulsion which goes with suffering and affliction recoiled entirely upon myself. And the quantity is very great, because the suffering in question is located at the very root of my every single thought, without exception.

This is so much the case that I absolutely cannot imagine the possibility that any human being could feel friendship for me. If I believe in yours, it is only because I have confidence in you and you have assured me of it, so that my reason tells me to believe it. But this does not make it seem any the less impossible to my imagination.

Because of this propensity of my imagination, I am all the more tenderly grateful to those who accomplish this impossibility. Because friendship is an incomparable, immeasurable boon to me, and a source of life — not metaphorically, but literally.

Since it is not only my body but my soul itself that is poisoned all through by suffering, it is impossible for my thought to dwell there, and it is obliged to travel elsewhere. It can only dwell for brief moments in God; it dwells often among things; but it would be against nature for human thought never to dwell in anything human.

Thus it is literally true that friendship gives to my thought all the life it has, apart from what comes to it from God or from the beauty of the world.

So you can see what you have done for me by giving me yours.

I say these things to you because you can understand them. Your last book contains a sentence, in which I recognize myself, about the mistake your friends make in thinking that you exist. That shows a type of sensibility which is only intelligible to those who experience existence directly and continuously as an evil.

For them it is certainly very easy to do as Christ asks and deny themselves. Perhaps it is too easy. Perhaps it is without merit. And yet I believe that to have it made so easy is an immense privilege.

I am convinced that affliction on the one hand, and on the other hand joy, when it is a complete and pure commitment to perfect beauty, are the only two keys which give entry to the realm of purity, where one can breathe: the home of the real.

But each of them must be unmixed: the joy without a shadow of incompleteness; the affliction completely unconsoled.

You understand me, of course. That divine love which one touches in the depth of affliction, like Christ’s resurrection through crucifixion — that love, which is the central core and intangible essence of joy — is not a consolation. It leaves pain completely intact.

I am going to say something which is painful to think, more painful to say, and almost unbearably painful to say to those one loves:

For anyone in affliction, evil can perhaps be defined as being everything that gives any consolation.

A pure joy, which in some cases may replace pain or in others may be superimposed on it, is not a consolation. On the other hand, there is often a consolation in morbidly aggravating one’s pain. I don’t know if I am expressing this properly; it is all quite clear to me.

The refuge of laziness and inertia — a temptation to which I succumb very often, almost every day, or I might say every hour — is a particularly despicable form of consolation. It compels me to despise myself.

I perceive that I have not answered your letter, and yet I have a lot to say about it. I must do it another time. Today I’ll confine myself to thanking you for it.

Yours most truly,

S. Weil

I enclose the English poem, “Love,” which I recited to you. It has played a big role in my life, because I was repeating it to myself at the moment when Christ came to take possession of me for the first time. I thought I was only reciting a beautiful poem, but, unknown to me, it was a prayer.