“Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. There is “absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish,” Weil writes, except for yielding ourselves to God. Her writing is animated by this compulsive longing to erase herself. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying I.” She dreams of vanishing completely: “May I disappear in order that those things that I see may
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