Normally, when we pay attention to someone or something, we undertake what Weil calls a “muscular effort”: our eyes lock on another’s eyes, our expressions reflect the proper response, and our bodies shift in relation to the object to which we are paying attention. This kind of attention flourishes in therapists’ offices, business schools, and fune

This is how affliction works: it “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.”

“We must keep from falling into inertia, believing that the liberation will be carried out by others. Each of us must know that one day it will be his duty to take part in it, and hold himself in readiness . . . We must think of the precious things we allowed to be lost because we did not know how to appreciate them, things that we have to regain a

In effect, the foreman judged Weil’s status not just as a worker, but also as a human being.

“To clarify thought, to discredit intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.”

In short, the way in which we read the world turns on our particular location—moral, social, political, and economic—within the world. And the world, of course, is what humankind makes of it.

Children have been taught, she wrote, that “things concerning the country . . . have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things.” But here’s the rub: “It is precisely in regard to those things that justice, consideration for others, and obligations assigning limits to ambitions and appetites never get mentioned.”

Weil’s factory experience taught her that, among the toxins produced by modern industry, thoughtlessness was most dangerous. But it was not just factories that manufactured this poison; nearly all organizations and institutions, by smothering the vital bond between language and meaning, make and keep us thoughtless.

As with any form of exercise that aims to train and strengthen, the proper exercise of our faculty of attention requires resistance. It is like an obstacle course we are asked to run, but it is a peculiar kind of course. Not only are the obstacles our fellow human beings, but they are also obstacles we have spent our lives learning not to see.