What monks know about focus.

“A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And ‘all machines,’ as Thoreau once said, ‘have their friction.’ The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working thro

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“I want to talk briefly about noticing, and how literature can make us better, or more serious, noticers. I will speak about three kinds of serious noticing—aesthetic noticing, human noticing, and metaphysical noticing. By aesthetic noticing, I mean the function that poetry and fiction have to help us see the world more closely and carefully—to see

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