In a letter to Thibon, included in his book Simone Weil as We Knew Her, Weil writes from America: The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation … we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be. Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good, in the one case through pleasure and in the other through sorrow… Soon there will be distance between us. Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated . In the introduction to Gravity and Grace, Thibon shares another 1942 letter from Weil, which further speaks to her idealism about friendship: Dear Friend, It seems as though the time has now really come for us to say goodbye to each other… Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. […] I also like to think that after the s