Uninhabitable Words: Sarah Klassen and Simone Weil

This essay examines Sarah Klassen’s sixth book, Simone Weil: Songs of Hunger and Love (1999), a collection of poems and brief prose pieces where the Canadian poet lends her first person to Simone Weil, French philosopher and mystic suspicious of mysticism. Following the lead of W.W. Meissner’s theory on the mystic act as ineffable, intuitive and free from space and time, I argue that Weil did not participate in the experience. On the one hand, she did not stop writing, as Thomas Aquinas did after his union with God. On the other hand, she tried to believe in God’s existence drawing upon criteria anchored in reality. Yet, Klassen, following up on the Mennonite tradition in which she was brought up, enters intuitively into Weil, transforming the latter’s experience into a mystic one and becoming, in the process of writing, a mystic herself.