Most of us treat attention like a budget. There is a limited amount, things take it from us, and we try to direct what is left at whatever matters. Simone Weil describes it as something else entirely, and she works it out from schoolwork.
“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.”
“Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence.”
“The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’”
1942
Her claim is that attention is emptying rather than gripping. The thing most of us do when we concentrate — furrowed, pushing, holding on hard — is not attention in her sense at all. It is muscular effort, and it produces fatigue and very little else.
Gripping has a cost that is easy to miss. When you push at a problem or a person, what fills your mind is your own pushing. You come away tired, and with your own version of the thing rather than the thing.
Emptying costs something harder: you have to be willing to wait without a result, which feels like failing. Weil’s answer to that is the second line above. The hour spent on a geometry problem you never solve is not a wasted hour. Something was trained that has nothing to do with geometry.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be able to hold ourselves open in front of something without immediately filling it in. The third line is why it matters — the same capacity that solves nothing in an hour of geometry is the capacity to hear what another person is actually going through, rather than the version of them we already carry.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The moment someone starts telling you something you think you have already understood.
- A problem you have been stuck on, at the point where you start pushing harder.
- A page you have read three times without taking any of it in.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — whether you are waiting in front of it or leaning on it. The feeling is different. Leaning is tight and it is busy. Waiting is uncomfortable and quiet.
You are not deciding anything, and you are not required to be patient. Notice which of the two is happening, and leave it as it is.