Re-reading Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Brilliant, radiant intellect. One of the most profound books I know. The essay on Pythagoreanism. The equations or affinities she develops between mathematical and religious concepts. Comparable notions of suffering, kenosis and mediation. The concept of number and the (trinitarian) nature of God. French clarity, & some other kind of depth and passion... this book is one of the cornerstones of civilization.

(BTW see Charles Simic's little poem in this week's New Yorker. This is a poem about kenosis.)

On a different topic : strong sense, walking around this morning, of poetry as evocative dream. When the imagination is stirred by the evocation of a feeling-scene... remote, rare, elusive, subjective, personal. Rilke comes to mind. The legend of the poet wrapped up in song-feeling-memory. Distance, absence. Adolescence. Hard for me to describe this clearly. Attendant sense of a kind of betrayal or desolation of this reality, in the constant internet chit-chat (my own, especially) about "poetry".

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(Maybe this isn't a completely different topic. There's a passage in Weil where she briefly analyzes the concept of the Trinity, and the idea of God as Subject, the one whose name is "I am"... & how it could be that God is wholly Love and Goodness, and also the active Subject, enveloping & encompassing all subjectivity... she identifies this with early Greek philosophers - e.g. Philolaus's terse saying about the One, whose first creation is Unity, the name of which is Hestia, or the hearth-fire... Weil outlines how this agrees with the idea of the Trinity...)