Attention

A man reads the same paragraph four times and reaches the end of it each time with nothing. What it brings back is Sunday: a friend who wanted to walk by the river with him, and told him something as they went, of which he cannot produce a line.

Simone Weil’s ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’ is about schoolwork. Prayer consists of attention, she says, and school exercises train the attention that prayer is made of. The theology is not detachable: faith is the indispensable condition, and the fruit she promises in prayer is found only by believing first, or at least behaving as though one did. She allows, apart from that, something narrower: an effort of attention made with the sole idea of increasing one’s grasp of truth brings a greater aptitude for it, quite apart from explicit religious belief.

Attention, she says, ‘is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness.’ Her target is the teeth-clenching kind of effort, which she gives almost no place in study. ‘Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object.’

Weil makes the step to people herself: of those in affliction, ‘warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough’. Going quiet is no simpler an answer. Takie Lebra, writing on silence in Japanese communication out of her own observation in Japan and America, distinguishes four dimensions of it and regards them as mutually contradictory, while declining to argue that Japanese silence is unique or to read universals into the Japanese case.

Weil has a use for the exercise that has gone wrong. It is to be contemplated attentively and slowly, ‘without seeking any excuse’ and ‘trying to get down to the origin of each fault’, since ‘there is no better exercise than such a tracing down of our faults’. One condition travels with it: the failed exercise is examined without overlooking any mistake or any of our tutor’s corrections.

Left open

What do we owe someone whose words we did not keep?

Who have we been quiet with, and did the quiet mean the same to both of us?