We know from  the recent biography of Michel Serres that at a young age he was enthralled by Simone’s Weil’s Gravity and Grace, first published in French in 1947. Reading it again sparks significant overlaps with some of Serres’ later thoughts on religion and mysticism. A few examples:

• Pleasure, happiness, prosperity – all come from chance, circumstances. Cannot be sought  but may surprise from the outside. What is most precious is given by chance.
• Atheism is an excellent form of purification, to avoid relying on something, some consolation. At end of the day, we are of no importance.
• “It is necessary not to be myself” (bursts any call to find or discover yourself, your true self, the ‘hero inside yourself’’).
• We need to be rooted in the absence of place (39).
• God exists and does not exist. Cannot be conceived in usual way.
• We must turn to universal. ‘Our role is to be ever turned towards the universal’ {Notre rôle est d’être tournés vers l’universel” [54]}. We are part of whole, nothing more or less.
• We know by means of intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend” (129).

The last page echoes a anticipates our time of crisis:

“After the collapse of our civilisation there must be one of two things: either the whole of it will perish like the ancient civilisations, or it will adapt itself to a decentralised world. It rests with us, not to break up the centralisation (for it automatically goes on increasing like a snowball until the catastrophe comes), but to prepare for the future” (177).

Page references to English translation Gravity and Grace (2002) and original French edition  La Pesanteur et la Grâce (1947).