99 Stories of God

97. Bread

Several months before her death, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in her notebook of someone who enters her room one day and says:

“Poor creature, you who understand nothing, who know nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things you do not suspect.”

He takes her to “a new and ugly church,” then to an empty garret. Days and nights pass. They talk and share wine and bread.

“The bread really had the taste of bread. I have never found that taste again.” She is content but puzzles: “He had promised to teach me, but he did not teach me anything.”

Then he drives her away. Her heart is broken and she wanders bereft. Still, she does not try to return. She understands that he had come for her by mistake, that her place was not in the garret.

The text ends with the words “I know well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle of myself, cannot help thinking with fear and trembling that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves me.”

Weil died at the age of thirty-four, after deliberately reducing her consumption of food for reasons that are still debated.