Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation
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What if the most sacred act isn’t what you believe, but how you pay attention? Simone Weil’s radical insight was that pure, undivided attention transforms even the most ordinary moment into something holy. When you give your full presence to a task, a person, or even your own pain, you’re not just “doing”—you’re offering a kind of silent devotion... See more
instagram.comThe proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Attentiveness entails the difficult task of waiting, not for the world to take note of us, but for us to take note of the world.
Robert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.