Detachment

Affliction is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation - no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.

To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death.

'He emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves to the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time - that is to say, to nothing.

To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world...

We must give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace.

The extinction of desire (buddhism) - or detachment - or amor fati - or desire for the absolute good - these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes.

To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void - to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. 

If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void. It has nothing to do with an intellectual process in the present-day sense. The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground. It is only good for servile tasks.

The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is not thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal.  Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in the providential ordering of events - in short the 'consolations' which are ordinarily sought in religion.

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage - and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Simone Weil