What we get wrong about attention

And why we need to talk about Simone Weil

Simone Weil, 1909–43

I’m leaping through time in my tour of the mystics, because we need to talk about Simone Weil.

Why?

Because she had powerful mystical experiences, yes.

But more than that, because she was a campaigner against colonialism, a political activist, and a person who time and again put not just her words but her body into the fight. She was tiny and would go for long stretches without eating, as well as being severely nearsighted and notably awkward in her body—all of which made her particularly ill-suited to both combat and manual labour. And yet she volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War and worked on factory assembly lines, as a farm labourer, and on fishing trawlers, as well as campaigning tirelessly with labour unions.

It’s true that her efforts weren’t always helpful on the practical level. In Spain, for instance, while trying to help the war effort, she stepped in a vat of boiling oil and severely burned her foot before she made it to battle. And when she was working on assembly lines, her colleagues often had to help her, taking on her work as well as their own because she couldn’t keep up.

Was this annoying? Undoubtedly. Is there a conversation to be had here about poverty tourism? Yes.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Because even if Weil was a hindrance on the factory floor, those work stints helped her to produce some of the twentieth century’s most provocative writing about attention. Attention as a moral force. Attention as the necessary, the vital response to affliction. True attention as a power potent enough to change the world.

And there’s never been a better time to talk about that.

So. What’s it like to pay attention? To force yourself to stay with something, to keep attending, beyond the point of comfort? Have you ever sat with something—be it schoolwork, meditation, a creative project, the suffering of others—for so long that it started to feel physically uncomfortable? Have you felt the monkey mind, that little beast that plucks and pinches at you, trying to draw you off elsewhere, to something, anything else?

What is that, actually? We talk a lot about inattention these days, of course, but I haven’t come across much interesting thinking about what that little beast actually is. The dominant cultural conversation seems to cast it as dopamine seeking—just a symptom of our bodies’ learned chemical dependencies. This mechanistic view tallies with a culture still living in the long shadow of the scientific revolution and under the illusion of individualism.

Weil had some very different ideas. Here’s a line I can’t stop thinking about this week, from her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”:

There is something in our soul which has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.

(Italics mine.)

In this essay, Weil (whose primary profession was teaching) writes that the core value of schoolwork isn’t to teach children about algebra or history, but rather to teach them how to concentrate, how to truly attend. And that the purpose of real attention is not that it helps you to solve problems but rather that it is the only route to truth—which is to say, in her view, to God. An hour spent studying an algebra problem, even and perhaps especially if you get no closer to solving it, will develop your capacity to open yourself for the arrival of truth. And cultivating this openness, this ability to empty yourself and await truth, is the true goal of life.

So what is that monkey mind, that little beast that plucks and pinches and tries to pull you off to something, anything else?

In Weil’s view, it’s a manifestation of evil. It’s what’s wrong with the world, at work within us. And this isn’t just a figure of speech. It has the most practical of applications. Because when we don’t attend properly—when we cast our attention on something briefly but then allow it to be drawn away, or when we satisfy ourselves with a too-quick answer instead of sitting with the problem until truth descends—we forever imprint ourselves, our prejudices, our misconceptions, on the people and the problems and the world around us, and so on the future. We forestall any true change.

By extension, real attention is the route to real change. I can’t put this any better than Weil herself, so I’m going to quote her at length:

Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do no possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous stone vessel which satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: “What are you going through?”

The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate”, but as a man, exactly like we are, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.

This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.

Only he who is capable of attention can do this.

With so much suffering in the world today, it may seem flippant or callous to suggest that the only thing “those who are unhappy” need is for others to pay attention to them. But as so often with Weil, there is a profoundly radical proposition at the heart of this statement. Because if we pay this kind of attention—if we refuse to look away even when it becomes physically painful to do so, even when the forces of evil inside us dance their damnedest to drag us to the next shiny object—then we cannot fail to be fundamentally changed by the experience. And when we are fundamentally changed by the experience, we cannot fail to change the world.

May we all attend this closely to what’s at work in the world today.

Love,

xx Ellie