There is a second, some way into something hard, where you stop and ask whether this is getting you anywhere. Simone Weil worked that second out from schoolwork — a child stuck on a geometry problem she is not going to solve. Let’s read her on it.
“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.”
Weil’s second sentence puts the effect of the hour somewhere that is not the problem. It lands on what she calls the spiritual plane, and it reaches the intelligence afterwards, as a consequence. So the hour did not go into the geometry. It went somewhere she says we have no way of inspecting, and the geometry received whatever came to it second-hand.
Measure the hour by what shows in the problem and you will stop when nothing shows. That reading is accurate about the problem. What it misses is that the question being asked in that second is about you — whether you are someone who is getting somewhere — and the unsolved problem has been brought in as the evidence.
Take her sentence as reassurance and the word genuine falls out of it. She wrote genuine effort of the attention, and attention is the emptying she describes in the first line. An hour spent near a book with your thought still full of itself is not covered by anything she says. This position keeps the comfort and drops the demand.
Work with no verdict available and you give up being able to tell a good hour from a bad one. There is no report coming. The thing does not move, you stay with it anyway, and at the end the only thing you know is that you were there.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be able to stay in front of something hard without asking it, partway through, what it is doing for us.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- A page of something difficult that you have now read twice and taken in almost none of.
- Sitting beside a child who is stuck on a sum, and the sum has not moved in ten minutes.
- A repair that is not going the way it should, and you have just stopped and straightened up.
In all three the thing to watch is one second — the one where you stop and ask whether this is getting anywhere. It has two answers. Is the thing in front of me still what I am looking at, or have I turned round to look at myself working.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to stop the question from coming. Watch which way you have turned, and leave it as it is.