Mind and feeling
Simone Weil
Attention
Simone Weil (France · 1909-1943) — Attention.
What actually happened?
In 1936 she went to the front in the Spanish Civil War and joined an anarchist column. She was severely short-sighted and barely a soldier; the story is that she fired once, at an aircraft. What struck her was not the fighting. Two years later she wrote to the novelist Georges Bernanos describing the atmosphere she had found: one in which killing had become something nobody needed to justify — a captured fifteen-year-old who would not change sides was shot — and in which nobody present was a bad man. She left because she stepped into a pan of boiling oil while cooking and was badly burned. Spain did not change which side she was on. It changed her test, from which side is right to what has force made of the people here.
Attention is emptying, not straining
Told to concentrate, people clench, as if closing a hand around something. She says that is muscular effort and the opposite of attention, which asks you to admit you do not yet understand and stay there so the thing can enter.
Handed a report you cannot read, the first move is to fit a familiar model over it. From then on the report cannot say anything of its own.
The time that produced nothing was not wasted
Effort that fails still grows something, provided the attention holds and you do not run. What grows is next time's discrimination. Only leaving actually voids the hour, which is why she thought the subject studied barely mattered.
You shipped nothing in the two hours you were stuck, and you will see faster where the next one is jammed.
She went and worked in the factories
In 1934 she took leave, hired on under her own name at piece rates and lived on the wages. What shook her was not exhaustion but finding she had stopped being able to think: the machine set the pace, the method came with the job, and no thought of hers could get in.
To learn how bad a process is, run it end to end yourself and forbid yourself from asking anyone inside for a shortcut.
What gets removed is judgement, not strength
Judgement unused decays, and past a point people being ground down stop protesting and concede the fault is their own. So the damage is invisible from outside: the room is quiet, and the quiet is the evidence it has finished.
Nobody objecting in the meeting rarely means nobody objects. It means they no longer believe objecting counts.
Force turns both sides into things
Reading the Iliad she said its true subject is force. The struck side becomes a thing first, but the side holding it changes too: the winner takes force for a property of himself and can no longer picture the day it comes round to him.
The party with all the leverage signs the contract the other side cannot perform, having stopped assuming the relationship continues next year.
How do I use it today?
Take twenty minutes today on something you cannot yet do, and forbid yourself from reaching for a ready-made framework partway through. When the timer stops, ask two things: did I run? Can I now say exactly which step it is jammed at? If you can, the twenty minutes were not wasted, whatever you produced. Then turn the same measure on your work: which step of today was waiting on your judgement?
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
What you call concentrating is straining. Attention is emptying yourself.
The half hour you failed to solve it is where learning happened.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
What empties you is not fatigue. It is work that needs no thought.
The winner loses not his conscience but his idea of tomorrow.