 Given that reality is itself metaxu, Weil’s late concept of mediation is more universal than the aforementioned specific examples suggest. For her the real (le réel) itself is an obstacle that represents contradiction, an obstacle felt, say, in a difficult idea, in the presence of another, or in physical labor; thus thought comes into contact with necessity and must transform contradiction into correlation or mysterious and crucifying relation, resulting in spiritual edification. Her explanation of this mediation is based on her idiosyncratic cosmology, especially its paradoxical claim that what is often painful reality, as distance from God, is also, as intermediate, connection to God. She illustrates this claim with the following metaphor: