Attention: A Tension
Love is a consistent sustained attention - john Muir Laws
Sustained attention is what we fail to give anything except possibly our phones.
The exception is when we take drugs to enhance our attention, which is part of the delightful Attention: A Love Story. It follows the writer, Casey Schwartz, through her college and career years as she slowly overdoses on Aderall to read with attention. She gets cleans and then pursues true attention which she realizes she never had. Drugs do not give you the muscle of attention, they take away the inhibitors that would cause you to strengthen the muscle.
She reads an Infinite Jest, observes an ayahuasca retreat, and ends up on the wrong side of the Me Too movement. This was interesting and I only picked my phone up a couple times over the handful of days I read. But that didn’t make it worth the read.
Tangled in the story of academic drugs is an admiration for Simone Weil, a young upper class woman who found Christ and spent her life giving her own to be like the poor she knew of. Simone Weil is too gnostic to emulate, but the book opens with a quote from her, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Simone found that attention in Christ and was able to extend it to others. She was at peace.
Casey Schwartz admitted her jealousy. Simone had rest and she could not. As Schwartz sorted through the influences in her life, the champions of attention, including David Foster Wallace and Aldous Huxley, she discovered that they all at least considered joining the Catholic church. The two who did not committed suicide. Schwartz could not account for the twinning of attention with belief. They were all interested in both.
In paying radical attention, they saw the testament of glory. You either wrestle with it to death or rest with the Maker, believe or be lost.
Schwartz could not see the natural end of the pursuit of attention. The questions that must be asked and answered.
But it is because the attention of God is the most abundant form of generosity in the world. In Him we live and move and have our being. The very thing that we struggle to lend to others, is the very thing constantly sustaining us - generosity.