Apple

 

Sugar in quantities is not good for me, so lately under the new regime of ‘changed, changed utterly’ I eat apples after meals. My daughter and I joke about it. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. I’m eating three apples a day. You are keeping three doctors away. That’s been the norm, given recent life in hospital, three doctors. Well, look now, no doctors. Large bags of juicy red apples are purchased regularly, making for a toppled mountain on the Iznik plate. If I’m not careful one will roll across the table edge and onto the floor. Carefully I bend to pick it up so as not to stretch the nerves around my ribcage. In early September I have promised to give a paper that includes material about Simone Weil, so now after meals I re-read lots of her essays, epigrams, and letters. Formidable, whether pronounced the English or French way, does not finally explain Simone Weil. On a given day in her Holland Park room in London in 1943 she can be analysing and questioning the terms of a new French Constitution for Charles de Gaulle and the Resistance active in that city, writing the posthumous book that became ‘L’Enracinement’ and (‘and’ in italics – ed.) composing elegant ten-page letters about the foundations of geometry to her mathematician brother André Weil, living safely in New York. There is no one else like Simone Weil and this is a consolation as I reflect on even the simplest of her spiritual sayings. A sentence in one letter to her parents, also in New York, goes: “The pure taste of the apple is as much a contact with the beauty of the universe as the contemplation of a picture by Cézanne.” In the context of rations and bombardments these words take on more meaning than they would anyway. I think of those people at this very moment now today in the world for whom an apple would be sufficient for the moment, with food scarce and the future not much future. I think of the person for whom the taste of the apple is enough reassurance to explain the universe, to put one entirely in touch with the universe, the universe in which we find ourselves; as complete with meaning as her valued Greek geometry and the geometric games of the French visual revolutionary Paul Cézanne. I think about the difficult fact that she is at time of writing starving herself because she refuses to eat more than her compatriots in occupied France, so that one apple might be all she is eating per day, we don’t know. This fact is where, like other extreme areas of her witness, I stop, asking would she not have been more help alive than dead at 34 from malnutrition and tuberculosis? But then, almost everything about Simone Weil is formidable and a confrontation to my settled perspectives. Or anyone’s perspective.