The Actual Density of The Real

Michal S Wośniak , Photo by Richard Finkelstein

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the work of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

― Simone Weil

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When I make bread, I think of the people who made the wheat pop up, I think of profiteers who artificially inflate the price, the technocrats who ruined the quality of it — not that recent techniques are necessarily bad, but the fact is that they have come to service of greed that is certainly an evil, and most of it exists only because of large concentrations of forces that are full of potential dangers.

I think of those who have no bread, and those who have too much, I think of the earth and the sun that makes plants grow. Feeling idealistic and materialistic at the same time. The so-called idealist does not see bread, nor the price of bread, and the materialist, for a curious paradox, ignores the meaning of that immense and divine thing that we call “matter”.

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987), With eyes wide open

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We’re told that matter doesn’t actually exist, except in a very transitory and illusory…