Simone Weil (1909-1943)
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her
beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life
course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that
“intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”
More than half a century before Oliver, another enchantress
of the human spirit — the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3,
1909–August 24, 1943), a mind of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a sort
of modern saint whom Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our
times” — wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which
we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.
In First and Last Notebooks — the out-of-print treasure that gave us Weil
on the key to discipline and how to make use of our suffering — she writes: Attention is the rarest and purest form of
generosity.
This piercing thought comes fully abloom in Gravity and
Grace — a posthumous 1952 collection
of Weil’s enduring ideas, culled from her notebooks by Gustave Thibon, the
farmer whom she entrusted with her writings before her untimely death. Weil considers the superiority of attention
over the will as the ultimate tool of self-transformation:
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by
will.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and
these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of
nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity,
inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of
this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can
only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse?
Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles
which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to
tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the
solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different. Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There
is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud
man. It is the result of a mistake.
Weil turns to attention as the counterpoint to this
graceless will — where the will contracts the spirit, she argues, attention
expands it: Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as
prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If
we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the
whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
Gravity and Grace is one of the most spiritually
nourishing texts ever published. Complement it with Weil on temptation and true
genius, then revisit writer Melissa Pritchard on art as a form of active prayer
and cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on reawakening our capacity for
attention.
