They don’t see, because they’re looking too hard
ALAIN
I’m writing this book by the sea. Rocked by the regular sound of the waves. Even when the sea isn’t there, I imagine it in order to write. The sea is humanity’s greatest secret, a secret we are only ever on the brink of understanding, even though it is spread out right before our eyes. But all we need to do is pay attention. Rhythm; the great secret is its rhythm. We think of the sea as a space, but above all it is time, circular time. The trough of the wave will also become its summit, sometime later, in a moment. And the summit will become a trough. The same point will be the lowest and the highest. Every high will become a low—humility—and every low will become a high—hope. It’s both metaphor and reality. The sea exists, and what does its silence say? The philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Every visible and palpable force is subject to an invisible limit that it will never exceed. In the sea, a wave rises up and up and up; but a certain point, even though there is nothing there but emptiness, stops it and makes it come back down.” These words, written in 1943 in London, resonate like a promise. However high Hitler rises, he will in the end come down again: it’s the rule of the waves and the rule of history. No progress is infinite; there is always a breaking point, a point of equilibrium. But the sea doesn’t just teach us history lessons, it also offers us a most beautiful exercise in perception. In Entretiens au bord de la mer (Conversations by the Sea), Alain, who was Simone Weil’s teacher, thinks of the ocean as a “breaker of idols”: “The whole sea endlessly expresses the idea that forms are false. Nature in this fluid state rejects all our ideas.” It is we who invent ideas, and then try to tack them onto the formless world. The sea doesn’t think, it’s happy just to be—everything changes there, nothing lasts. But it respects a rhythm. The wave breaks, then withdraws before returning; it draws its strength from this withdrawal that gives it momentum. The sea tells us that you have to learn to relax into effort, just as oarsmen know how to rest between each stroke. If you truly wish to act you must learn not to be always acting: rest must be integrated into the action. In Minerva, or on Wisdom, Alain notes: “If you’re always holding on tight you’ll hold badly. The true athlete relaxes during the game and only tightens their grip at the moment of contact.”
The game is the one you’re playing, and above all it’s the game of your own body, of the muscles, the legs, the alternation of contraction and relaxation that is essential to effective action. Watch a sprinter in slow motion: you will see that their face is relaxed and their cheeks are without tension. The sprinter’s aim, particularly in the last part of their race, is total relaxation. This law of alternation between effort and rest, embodied in the play of the sea’s waves, is the first law of nature. This rhythm controls our whole life and it is better if we know it. Alain: “If you deprive yourself of sleep, you deprive yourself of waking. Someone who doesn’t sleep enough is literally poisoned by his own restlessness. Someone who has slept is washed clean.” Rest allows the mind to be cleansed and to renew itself like a wave. And we shouldn’t think of this rest simply as night as opposed to day or as sleep opposed to waking: “Those who have carefully studied the faintest sounds have discovered something they were not looking for. A very faint, sustained sound is heard as intermittent. Our attention beats, like our pulse, it takes little naps, it backs off and then tunes back in.” Contrary to general opinion, attention is never continuous. It’s not a question of will, it cannot be so. It obeys a rhythm, it has highs and lows. Attention is a wave on which we must learn to surf.
In this chapter I have brought together everything required for an understanding of the mechanisms of our attention. It is a veritable recipe book and that is what I intended, so that you can come back to dip into it as you wish. I have called it “The Secret Laws of Attention,” because these laws, although they structure all our activities, remain essentially hidden. Facility is not a dream. It is within our grasp. We can begin at once—we just need to follow the right method.
The point of a method, as its name suggests, is to make life easier. Odos or hodos, in Greek, means “the road.” Descartes’ method is one that shows which road to follow in order to think as easily as possible, but, as we shall see, it can also be used to guide our actions. It only has four rules: the (self-)evident; dividing up the difficulties; order; and enumeration.
1. The evident comes from the Latin video, “to see.” The evident is what happens when you see something with the mind’s eye, i.e., you understand it. The evident is not a starting point but a result. It is the result of attention. Imagine attention as a swath of light, the beam of a torch. This swath of light is narrow but intense. The attention cannot therefore shine on many objects at the same time. Ideally, attention should focus on only one point at a time. Therefore you must always:
2. Divide up the difficulties. Think of one thing at a time. Don’t try to grasp everything at once. Don’t be in a rush, take one step at a time, and take all the time you need to grasp what is evident in each part. Something that is particularly complex has to be cut up into as many small parts as necessary. Once they are cut up and understood they must be put into:
3. Order. Thinking is putting the parts that one has cut up into the right order. This order is not natural, it is an intellectual order. A logical order and one that is invented, that of a mathematical proof, for example, or of a book or a manual for learning how to play tennis. You go from the simple toward the complex so as to progress from the easiest to the most difficult. It is order that makes this progress easy. Since you have cut up the complexity into little parts and have put them in a new order, you then have to be sure that you haven’t forgotten anything and therefore proceed to an:
4. Enumeration. A naming of parts. An overview. A panorama. Call it what you will, the idea is to be certain that you have not left out an important part. The risk, when you bring your attention to bear on one point, is that you lose sight of the bigger picture. You must therefore regularly widen your point of view to make sure that everything is included.
OK. Now that I have introduced you to the four rules of the Cartesian method, all of which rest on the observation that our attention is narrow, and cannot take many things in at the same time, nor understand them quickly, I should add that attention doesn’t last very long either. Therefore you must above all be able to rest, to relax completely between two moments of concentration and learn to know yourself well enough to see how long you can concentrate without faltering. For Montaigne it was ten minutes. Paying attention means not trying or tensing up. You must never, ever insist. Montaigne: “What I don’t see at the first shot, I see even less when I keep on trying.” You don’t keep on trying, you relax, try again later when you’ve recovered a little. That might be after a few seconds. Or several minutes. Or the next day. To each his own rhythm.
The essential point is never to try to overcome complexity in one go. Not to try to understand everything, nor understand it all at once. To resolve a problem, you must dissolve it, and divide into as many parts as possible what at first sight seems like an overwhelming mass. If you observe this method, provided that you divide up the difficulties, then organize them in order of difficulty “to advance little by little, by degrees,” like the steps of a staircase, as Descartes says, it doesn’t matter what the object of your thought is, “there cannot be anything so distant that you won’t reach it, or so hidden that you won’t discover it.” Just take one step at a time, don’t dash off down the line of proof, any more than the tightrope walker runs along his rope: he only takes the next step if he is balanced. This way you will go as far as it is possible to go.
This rule of dividing up difficulty and concentrating effort also works with action. Alain: “Don’t do all the action in one go; don’t get ready to take a single leap over the hill; don’t think of all those miles still to go.” Napoleon, in a very Cartesian way, recommends that one should not attack everywhere at the same time. It is better to restrict oneself to precise places, and bring all one’s attention to bear on them. An action of maximum intensity aimed at a single place will be more effective than an effort that is dispersed. Dividing up the difficulty does not mean dividing up your effort; it means concentrating your effort on one point, then another. Napoleon engaged not in “parallel warfare” of old-fashioned strategy, in which you fought everywhere at the same time, but rather in warfare of maneuver, which consists of attacking certain strategic points with all one’s strength. Rather than fighting in a line, you drive nails into the joints and vital organs of the enemy. Acupuncture proceeds in much the same way: you have a greater effect by placing a few needles carefully on precise spots than by spreading them all over the surface of the body. This entails knowing where exactly to place them. Therefore you must simplify your vision, not get lost in the details, and always keep an overview. “There are many good generals in Europe,” said Napoleon, “but they see too many things; I see the big shapes and attack them, certain that the peripheral ones will then collapse of their own accord.” If one attacks the complexities in the right order, some will disappear of their own accord. This question of order also concerns the organization of the attack: “One does not win a war with a large number of troops, but with well-organized and disciplined troops.” It’s not that things are easy or difficult. It is the order you put them in that creates ease. Order, and the place where you attack.
Plato compared dialectic, or the art of thinking clearly, to cutting up a chicken: you mustn’t force it, by going straight at the bone, but rather slip the knife in at the point of least resistance, at the joint between the bones. Thinking clearly is separating what is already distinct, respecting the anatomy of things simply by being attentive to them. You don’t cut roughly, you slip in subtly, looking for the joint. The blade of the mind destroys nothing, but slips in between the ideas. Understanding a problem is the same thing as understanding a chicken. Vegetarians probably won’t like this metaphor, but you can adapt it to fruit and vegetables. There is an art to separating a fruit from its skin without damaging it, in slipping your nail and then your finger between the orange and its peel to separate them without spilling juice, to peeling a banana without crushing it, to cutting a peach without jabbing the stone. The metaphor loses a little of its toughness; in the absence of bones you can actually cut a fruit or a vegetable any way you like, but it is improved on a different level, since it assumes a more careful attention to subtle resistances, and introduces the idea of time and ripening. You can judge the ripeness of an avocado from the way that its flesh adheres, or doesn’t, to the stone, but by then it is too late to close it up again. It is better, before opening it, to judge it like a peach or an apricot from the firmness of its flesh. But in the case of the avocado, the thickness of the skin makes this examination less than certain. As in the case of melons, you can look to see whether the stem or stalk is beginning to come away. In all cases, touch and observation are far better than the knife. The hand feels and knows that where there is a resistance it is not yet ripe. You have to be able to wait. When it’s ripe it’s obvious. Here you have both a principle of thought and of action: if you look for the joints and apply your effort there, there will actually be no need for effort. Paying attention is like slipping between things where it is easy, rather than attacking them any old way.
Why did Orpheus turn back to look at Eurydice? Obviously because he had been forbidden to do so. It’s not really Orpheus who is responsible for the second death of his wife, but the perverse Hades, god of the infernal regions, who trapped him in the simplest way: by putting into his mind the thought of the forbidden action. The god of the infernal regions sows the seed of evil and invents temptation. If Orpheus hadn’t been thinking about not turning back to see Eurydice, he would not have done it. When you think you are resisting a temptation, you are already imagining yielding to it. Because in making an effort to oppose a thought, one strengthens the thought. One could call that the Orpheus syndrome, or the law of inverted effort.
“There comes a moment,” writes the Christian philosopher Jean Guitton, in Le travail intellectuel (Intellectual Work), “when the effort brought to bear on an external obstacle produces an internal obstacle that is more insidious than the other and constantly increases it, the more so if you struggle against it, as can be seen with people who stammer.” When you struggle against a forbidden image,
a certain way of directing your effort in order to banish the image makes it more likely you will intensify it. The body cannot tell the difference between no and yes. To say “I am not afraid, I do not wish to be afraid of this passing shell,” means amplifying the images you are trying to resist. By trying not to tremble at moments of fear, you simply increase the trembling. Tensing up so as not to yield to temptation makes you likely to give in to it more quickly. Old Coué said, in—to my view—overly geometric language, that when there is a struggle between the imagination and the will, the imagination will expand to equal the square of the will. The law of the inversion of misdirected effort is one of the most profound laws of our psyche. I am amazed people don’t talk about it more and that it isn’t taught. Whenever, in spite of excellent guides and sincere good intentions, I have failed to learn a simple art (geometry, or riding, for instance), it is because my teachers were unaware of this principle of inversion. I would stiffen on the horse’s back, as before a theorem, and the result was either that I fell, or was plunged into darkness. You must work in a state of relaxation. True attention comes from trying not to try. You must avoid this inversion of effort, which is fatal in almost every case of prolonged tension. The art of not even trying consists in never allowing one’s will to become irritated and to tense up; in imitating natural creatures; in letting oneself go; in “humoring one’s will,” as Montaigne says; that is to say, never willing something unless consciously and at the right moment, remembering that the will, as a life force, can also grow weary and lose focus. There is a state of abandoned thought, somewhat mindless, a semi-waking dream which favors memory, invention and also writing.
So, Simone Weil was a pupil of Alain. He said of her that she was capable of truly understanding Spinoza, which is no small compliment, since he said it of only two people, her and . . . Goethe. Spinoza affirmed that “what is beautiful is rare and difficult” and distinguished three types of knowledge: the first type, which consists merely of lining up facts that one cannot verify, known only by hearsay (my date of birth, for example) and off-the-cuff judgments made by the imagination (the moon must be a few hundred meters away, it looks so close tonight); the second type, which produces truths by employing the difficult and roundabout route of rational proofs (mathematics, philosophy); and finally, the third type, which has the same content as that of the second type, but gets there more directly, by intuition, with ease, and in which, Spinoza promises, we experience a sense of eternity in this life “as far as that is possible.” At the end of the difficult road of reason shines the “love of God”—intuitive understanding, in other words—with no effort on one’s own part, or that of others, or of nature. How do you reach this light? You must work, you must go through all the rigors of proof. It’s beautiful, and therefore “rare and difficult,” but strangely—and this is my point—the battle of the truth against what is false requires no tension, no effort against oneself. The spirit must simply obey its own nature, which is to think of what is true in order to triumph over what is false, indirectly, exactly as the day, when it breaks, triumphs over the darkness without resistance or struggle. The spirit’s perfect nature is to understand: the more it understands, the greater its joy. When I think, therefore I am not making an effort against myself, I am simply persisting in being what I am. I am trying to be ever more what I already am. I don’t make an effort, I am the effort—as Spinoza says, a conatus (from the Latin conari: “to try, to strive for”)—which costs me nothing since I am simply doing what comes most naturally to me. To put it another way, anyone who makes an effort to understand will never understand. That’s not how it works.
Understanding can’t be forced. At most, it can be prepared for. When we understand, there is no tension. It’s more like a kind of light.
And that’s where Simone Weil comes in. In a text called Attente de Dieu (Waiting for God), a title that clearly indicates its Christian orientation, Simone Weil draws our attention to a truth about our minds that is as valid on a cognitive level as on a spiritual one: paying attention is not what we think. I have decided to quote generously from this book because it is unrivaled in its perfection and its simplicity and because its truth, as Simone Weil indicates at the end of the text, is relevant not only to believers.
Most often, attention is confused with some kind of muscular effort. If you say to pupils: “Now pay attention,” you see them frown, hold their breath, tense their muscles. If, after two minutes, you ask them what they have been paying attention to, they can’t give you an answer. They haven’t being paying attention to anything. They haven’t been paying attention. They’ve been tensing their muscles. In studying you often expend this kind of muscular effort. As it ends up being tiring, you feel as though you’ve been working. This is an illusion. Tiredness has no relationship with work. This kind of muscular effort when studying is completely sterile, even when carried out with the best of intentions.
[ . . . ] Intelligence can only be led by desire. For desire to exist there must be pleasure and joy. Intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as essential to study as breathing is to runners.
Attention is an effort, the greatest effort of all, perhaps, but it is a negative effort. In itself it does not entail tiredness. When tiredness is felt attention is almost impossible unless you are well practiced; so then it is better to give in, look for some relaxation and begin again a bit later, letting yourself go and bringing yourself back, just as you breathe in and out.
Twenty minutes of intense attention without any tiredness is infinitely more valuable than that kind of application with furrowed brow which says “I’ve worked hard,” with a sense of duty done.
[ . . . ]
[When you get it wrong], it’s almost always because you tried to be active; you tried to seek. The most precious things must not be sought, but waited for. There is for every schoolbook exercise a specific way of waiting for truth “desire-fully,” without going out to look for it. Of paying attention to the details of a geometrical problem without looking for the solution; a way of paying attention to the words of a Latin or Greek text without looking for the meaning; of waiting, when one is writing, for the right word to flow from your pen of its own accord.
[ . . . ] For any adolescent who can grasp this truth and is generous enough to desire this fruit above all others, studying will have a full and rich spiritual impact even where there is no framework of religious belief.
Attention is therefore a negative effort, in the sense that it costs nothing, calls for no expenditure of energy, and produces no tiredness. If you feel tired when you are paying attention, it is because you are tensing up unnecessarily; you are mistakenly making an effort, instead of letting things come to you. Attention is a pure gaze, incompatible with tiredness. Alain states: “Before the war, I often used to get hooked on a problem and would struggle thinking about it without making any progress. That is the same mistake as staring at something one wants to see properly. Often I have encountered these insistent gazes, applied to the quest for knowledge; they don’t see, because they are looking too hard.” Attention must be as easy and relaxed as a well-trained athlete and the first condition for it is rest. Attention obeys the primordial rhythm of the breath or the sea. Studying is therefore worth nothing in and of itself, the grades are worthless (Alain’s best pupil tells us that), and the principal value of geometry and poetry lies in the fact that they provide training in a certain kind of attention. Why? Because if I am truly capable of attention, then one day I will be in a position to pay attention to other people. I will be incapable of not seeing them. And seeing properly is already a way of doing good. A universal spiritual truth, says Simone Weil, that concerns not only believers, but all human beings.
Jean-Paul Sartre was also one of Alain’s pupils. He doesn’t talk about Alain, or only very little, but Sartre agrees with Alain and Simone Weil at least on the question of attention, in that it should not be an effort. In one of his most famous texts, L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), on mauvaise foi (bad faith), he writes: “The attentive pupil who wants to be attentive, his eye fixed on the teacher, ears wide open, wears himself out so much by playing the attentive one that he ends up not listening at all.” Believing that attention is an effort is exhausting. And pretending to be attentive to please the teacher prevents you from understanding. Here we find again the law of the inversion of misdirected effort: the harder one pushes oneself toward a goal, the more likely one is to miss it.
Sartre, who wrote this text in the middle of the ordered chaos of the Café de Flore, is clearly suggesting that the peace and quiet of a classroom is perhaps less favorable to understanding and intellectual work than the relative disorder of a café. In the café, attention seems blocked from the very first moment, condemned to be dispersed. Yet certain people manage to work there, Sartre being one of them, and indeed some people can only work there, amid the noise of others and the hubbub of life. Silence is not always favorable. When the attention is distracted, it grasps the truth out of the corner of its eye as it passes, like a skillful fisherman. Such distraction sometimes provides the solution to a problem you can’t resolve by tackling it head-on. Some distracting activity can therefore actually make work easier. It enables you not to think of what you are doing and to be content with simply doing it.
It also builds up momentum. When you are in a busy environment you avoid the difficulty of beginning, and you understand that the only thing to do is to carry on. Some people like working to music. I am one of them. Music always draws us in, taking us by the hand, and we take advantage of its movement. Running to music also has its devotees: you run better, farther, more easily; you forget the effort. Attention, caught up by the music, allows the body to do what comes naturally without getting tangled up in thought.
Let’s return to the example of the pan, the one we burned in the introduction to this book. It is quite clear that there are two different ways to clean it—to scrub or not to scrub, that is the question. Either one scrubs with all one’s might, and it’s hard work, or one leaves it to soak and allows water and time to do their work—the crafty way. The first method is based on effort, the second on ease. Effort saves time and wastes energy (and incidentally runs the risk of damaging the pan). The second method, which is easier, requires time, and saves time, since in the end cleaning the pan after having soaked it will be quicker and require much less effort. You’ll have less work to do, and you’ll do it better. Postponing the action and letting things look after themselves is a win-win, because the result is better from every point of view. Far from giving in to ease out of laziness, you have demonstrated ingenuity in finding a simpler and more effective approach. You’ve chosen patience. This second solution is at once more rational and more economical: in a nutshell, more elegant. Speaking of elegance when you’re washing the dishes might seem exaggerated or out of place, but elegance is linked to the idea of economy and rationality. Whether in fashion, in science, or in everyday life, the most elegant solution is always the most economical one. Descartes and Coco Chanel would agree on that. A little black dress, like a mathematical proof, aims at understatement, simplicity. Nothing chichi, no useless ornaments—that’s the way to go. That’s what beauty is. But watch out, for sometimes the most effective solution is precisely not to wait, but to leap straight into action. For example, to stick with dishwashing, it’s better to clean a dish in which you have cooked a duck breast immediately, before the fat sets. How do you know whether to wait or not, and whether postponing is a clever trick or just proof of laziness? No need for an objective criterion. In the end you always know.
Alexander Grothendieck, who won the Fields Medal in 1966 (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics) and who was an authentic genius recognized for his original intuition and copious discoveries, also uses this method. In mathematics there are no burned pans as such, but there are problems that catch, some of which stick for centuries and which whole generations scrub away at. Author of a monumental work, several thousand pages of which have yet to be explored, after having revolutionized algebraic geometry and opened the field to an army of researchers, Grothendieck turned his back forever on the mathematical community and went to live far away in a little village in the Ariège, devoting himself to meditation. His contribution to the problem of space, according to specialists, is as significant as that of Einstein. Both put space at the center of the history of the universe. I’m going to refer here not to the contents of his mathematical work—that would be beyond me—but to his method for resolving the most intractable difficulties. In addition to his mathematical work, Grothendieck left a substantial autobiography, still unpublished and available on the internet, entitled Récoltes et semailles (Reaping and Sowing). In it he describes the two main methods for addressing a problem.
Let us take, for example, the task of proving a theorem which remains hypothetical (which in some people’s view is what mathematical work is all about). I can see two opposite ways of going about this. One is that of the hammer and the chisel, when the problem in question is seen as a big nut, hard and smooth, which you have to break in to to reach the nourishing flesh protected by the shell. The principle is simple: you place the cutting edge of the chisel against the shell and hit hard. If necessary you do the same in several different places until the shell breaks—and then you are happy. This approach is especially tempting when the surface of the shell has rough or knobbly places where one can get a grip. In certain cases it is obvious where these knobbly places are, in other cases we have to turn the nut every which way and inspect it carefully before finding a point of attack. The most difficult case is when the shell is perfectly and uniformly rounded and hard. However hard you hit it, the cutting edge of the chisel skids and scarcely scratches the surface and you end up exhausting yourself. Even so, muscle power and endurance will sometimes bring success.
This first method, as muscular as it is inelegant, is obviously not the one he prefers.
I could illustrate the second approach by keeping the image of the nut which has to be broken open. The first image that came to my mind just now is that of plunging the nut into an emollient liquid, perhaps simply water, and from time to time rubbing it so that the liquid works its way in and otherwise leaving time to do its job. The shell gets softer over weeks and months—when the time is ripe it is enough to give it a squeeze and the shell opens like a perfectly ripe avocado! Or again, you could leave the nut to ripen under the sun and the rain and even perhaps through the winter frosts. When the time is ripe a tender shoot coming from the flesh within will have broken through the shell, almost playfully—or to put it another way, the shell will have opened of its own accord to allow it through. The image that came to me a few weeks ago was quite different: the unknown thing that I had to know seemed to me like an expanse of land or dense rock, resisting penetration. You can hack away with picks or crowbars or even pneumatic drills: that’s the first approach, the chisel one (with or without hammer). The other approach is that of the sea. The sea moves forward imperceptibly and silently, nothing seems to break, nothing moves, the water is so far away one can scarcely hear it . . . however, in the end it surrounds the recalcitrant material, and little by little it becomes a peninsula, then an island, then an islet, which ends up submerged, as if it was finally dissolved in the ocean, which stretches out as far as one can see . . . That’s the “sea” approach, of submerging, absorbing, dissolving—the approach in which, if one is not very careful, nothing ever seems to happen: at each moment, each thing is so obvious and above all so natural that often one would scarcely bother to write it down, for fear of appearing to be inventing it, instead of tapping away with your chisel like everyone else . . .
This text is rather long, but the network of images that it proposes is so coherent, it deserves to be left intact. Two approaches, then: the first that of the hammer and chisel; the second that of the sea. The first goes straight at the difficulty and hits it, trying to break it come what may; the second, patient, elegant, widens our vision and allows time for the difficulty to resolve itself naturally and easily. It is not the difficulty that has changed nature, but the manner of approaching it that has solved it without effort. The full-frontal method of impatient people can work, but it remains essentially inelegant, which is enough to condemn it definitively in the eyes of a mathematician who is as much an aesthete as an intuitive.
Resolving a difficulty is also an artistic problem; for instance, the musician faced with a score. When you perform a work you have no choice, you must play all the notes as written and follow the route you’ve been given. What do you do when you get stuck? Discussing editions of the pianist Alfred Cortot’s work, Hélène Grimaud decries the suggestion to practice difficult sections of a piece—such as problematic thirds, fourths, or arpeggios—out of context and independently of the whole. She writes:
For me this method is the perfect way of creating a problem where none existed and of inventing difficulties before they arise. When there is a real technical difficulty it is precisely the musical context that helps you overcome it, the context from which the Cortot editions would like to separate it. Rather like a horse that insists on jumping only the most difficult obstacle in a course, without the momentum derived from the beginning of the race and without being lured on by the remainder of his run . . .
After Grothendieck’s sea image, we have Grimaud’s image of the galloping horse. In each case the idea is not to focus directly on the difficulty, not to insist on resolving it in isolation, but to fit it into a bigger picture and put it into its place, so that it disappears as you go by, without stopping to look at it directly. Not to give it more importance than is necessary, not to accord it significance in the race. Above all not to insist. The pianist Glenn Gould had a comparable technique, which involved putting the radio and television on at full blast before he attempted a very difficult piece, so that he couldn’t hear himself play. The block would immediately disappear; perhaps the mind, too busy with the background noise and incapable of thinking of the difficulty that usually blocked it, could no longer be frightened by it. The din thus liberated twofold, first by distracting the mind from its task and then by making any possible error completely undetectable.
The tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, describes his technique for overcoming a block: “If day by day, little by little, a stunt starts to pose problems for me, to the point where I can’t use it, I have to think of an alternative movement to replace it in my show. Otherwise I might find myself having a panic attack.” So there is no pressure, it’s not a case of double or quits, the tightrope walker knows how to land on his feet; he has a backup solution. But that doesn’t mean that he admits defeat. He continues to attempt the stunt “each time with more trepidation and stealth. I want the feat to stay and to feel I’ve conquered it.” If the stunt continues to pose problems, he “flee[s] the field. But without the slightest fear.” A strange situation, since he recognizes both “more trepidation” but “not the slightest fear.” Trepidation at the thought of messing up the stunt in training has in fact nothing to do with the fear of messing it up on the day of the show. You might even say paradoxically that this trepidation prevents fear, since thinking about the stunt completely fills his mind. Rather than of trepidation, which seems to be synonymous with fear, we should talk of extreme attention. In the end, the word “attention” implies both trepidation—just as when you shout “Watch out!”—and the opposite of fear, since rather than paralyzing us, well-focussed attention allows us to eliminate the danger and find a solution.
“I am never afraid on the rope,” says Philippe Petit, “I’m too busy.” Action saves you from fear; there are so many things to do on the rope that there’s no time for it. The problem comes before that. Imagination and passivity increase the sense of danger. When you have all the time in the world you always think about the worst. Philippe Petit’s method consists of managing every detail of his performance in person: the preparation and transportation of the material, the installation of the cable and the choice of place; everything is organized like a heist. Usually he’s doing something illegal, but rather than being an additional difficulty that is an essential part of the success of the “job.” Concern about being arrested, found out, or recognized before he can launch himself on his rope enables him to not be afraid and to not think for one moment about what he is going to do. Illegality is not a detail. It allows him to not think about the actual crossing. Philippe Petit doesn’t expressly say this. But that’s probably also why he’s so fond of these problems. While you’re busy solving a problem you don’t think about the drop. You solve each problem in turn, you give in to necessity. Giving in: what could be easier?
When you’ve got a problem, don’t think about solutions but think about the problem itself, love it as if it were a person, let it speak for itself. The solution will come once you have agreed to settle into it, and given up any idea of leaving it, rather than if you turn your back on it, hell-bent on getting away. Moreover, there is true joy to be found in the problem. Nothing is more exciting than a problem to be solved. It’s a chance to exercise your imagination, your intelligence, your intuition. A problem is a hand reaching out toward you and every problem always brings its own solution, if you look at it the right way. Solutions spring up easily of their own accord. If several solutions present themselves, choose the simplest one. If they are all equally simple, go for the most elegant one. Elegance, explains Philippe Petit, is doing as little as possible. Imagine there’s a ladder you need to take up three stories on the outside of a building. To take the ladder up you’ve got a rope. Though the usual way would be to tie lots of knots to make the ladder safe, Philippe Petit demonstrates on a model how he did it without tying a single knot. All he had to do was to slip a loop of the rope between the top bars of the ladder and then thread the ends of the rope through this loop. By this means the ladder is both held up by the rope and stabilized by its own weight when it’s pulled up. Petit uses the ladder’s shape to solve the particular problem it presents. He doesn’t go against this shape, he uses it as it is. An obstacle is always a leverage point, that’s the secret. As far as the weight of the ladder is concerned, there too he uses it to stabilize the object like the bob on the end of a plumb line, or like the weight hanging at the end of a pendulum. Each time, the tightrope walker uses the problem itself as the solution. And when he is walking on a rope with the help of a pole weighing up to 55 pounds, it’s by using this weight, which would be a handicap for a beginner, as a means of anchoring himself on the rope, to sink into the rope and ground himself in it to keep a better balance. And sometimes an unforeseen difficulty presents an unforeseeable solution. When he was looking for the best place to pull off his stunt at the very top of the Twin Towers, Philippe Petit hurt his foot quite badly. He was forced to use crutches, and he returned to the entrance to the building cursing his handicap, convinced that it would make him much more likely to be recognized and to be hindered in his reconnaissance. But the opposite happened. The security guards, seeing him physically challenged, opened the doors, took care of him, and gave him much easier access. The difficulty had involuntarily become an unintended stratagem. Philippe Petit, though a master of disguise, hadn’t thought of it himself, but given the chance he seized it.
Preparation is often confused with practicing. Excessive practice can also make you stale. By removing every risk, you still run the risk of reducing your desire and wearing out your concentration. You need to trust in the first time. Hélène Grimaud says: “I have never liked having a run-through of a work before an opening concert. Why would you have your first kiss in substandard conditions? A bad hall, bad acoustics, and average piano? The first time I refused a run-through of this kind, everyone told me it was suicide. I stuck to my guns, but each time I was amazed at the general hostility I incurred.” Until the day when Martha Argerich, one of the greatest pianists in the world, said to her, “This idea of running through a work in advance is really ridiculous. It is the first time you play something that you really need to match what you’ve imagined during the many hours of work, preparation, and practice.” Alain comes close to this idea when he says that you have to succeed at the first shot. The attention is a weapon that you mustn’t use until you need it. Hélène Grimaud goes further: “The first time is often magical: nothing has happened to diminish the utopian idea that you had of the work. Your playing is bathed in an ephemeral and resplendent grace. The second time, you have to get back up there, and start again, this time with a full awareness of everything that can go wrong.”
Insisting, whether with the body or in thought, is always counterproductive. The more you force, the more you fail. Worse still: you might hurt yourself. Yannick Noah recognizes of course that “interiorizing a technique cannot be done without effort, but you must choose the most intelligent method and reject the less attractive aspects of the work.” Mechanical repetition of a gesture does not really enable you to master it. You are bound to wear yourself out, but you may start to doubt yourself too.
By repeating the gesture over and over the pupil ends up by reaching a decent success rate under ordinary conditions, but nothing proves that he will be able to maintain that under extreme conditions. It’s better to take the time to intellectualize the gesture, to understand it and to imprint it once and for all on one’s subconscious: it’s explained to you, you test it, it’s explained to you again if necessary, you test it again, and if you are certain that you’ve understood it that’s enough—there’s no point going on and on! Next!
Once you’ve understood, there’s no point in insisting. It’s like tuning a guitar. Once you’ve found the right pitch for a string you must stop looking. You would only detune it again by persisting. This brings us back to the question of the 10,000 hours. A purely quantitative approach to training, even if it includes the idea of “mindful practice,” based on a conscious effort toward a precise goal, doesn’t work. Noah says that it’s enough for a “knot” to form in a player’s head, and no one to come to his aid, for him to leave his body and just go through the motions of training. “Then he could spend five hours a day on court without getting any benefit from it. He will lose and then say ‘I don’t understand, I’m trying really hard, I trained really hard but I had an off day.’”
To undo this kind of knot, first of all you have to relax. Not insist. Not pull on the knot. Take up a comfortable position and start by breathing properly. Relaxation doesn’t come directly; if someone tells you to relax you are going to tense up, and this takes us back to the law of the inversion of misdirected effort. Once again, you reach the goal indirectly by concentrating your attention on your breathing. If you breathe well, slowly and deeply, you cannot fail to relax. It happens all by itself.
Then, to make the right gesture, you have to begin by understanding it, imagining it, visualizing it. In Chariots of Fire, the trainer, Sam Mussabini, explains to the sprinter Harold Abrahams that he is confusing speed and haste: “Don’t over stride!” It’s enough, the trainer explains to him, to do two extra steps over a hundred meters, therefore smaller steps, in order to win. What you’re after is spring, naturalness, and relaxation, rather than the effort of a huge leap. It’s first and foremost a mental task, calling for imagination. “Visualization,” Noah explains, “opens up as many perspectives as in-depth work, and is just as effective as hours of mechanical training.” You can work at your technique without getting out of bed: you start by visualizing a wonderful place. Using the rhythm of your breath, you take possession of your body. You dissect the movement or the activity that you want to master. Then you visualize yourself executing the perfect gesture. This gesture imprints itself on the brain and can be modified at will.
The aim of visualization is simple: to enter into the gesture. I have a very precise memory of Sampras at the French Open at the time of his marathon-like matches in 1996. He was so relaxed that gradually he just became part of the game. He served in this fantastically relaxed way, he was on top of every ball, he was the serve, he was the shot. He was tennis. And it was extraordinary to watch, because it’s so rare that someone can relax their body to that extent. But as it happens, it was a matter of survival, because he was reaching the limit of his physical capacity. It seemed to me he was showing us tennis which only he could visualize.
Visualization is based on the association of the imagination with the body. If you imagine well, you act well. And mastery of a gesture will come not from physical repetition but rather from switching back and forth between imagination and action. “Once the gesture is accomplished, there’s no point in repeating it 50,000 times. It’s there. You’ve got it. It won’t fly away. Even in an extreme situation.” Maybe that’s the most surprising part: a gesture learned in this way is so deeply known that it will always be available, even under stress. The advantages of this method are countless: you can carry on working even when you are injured. And you are free to imagine all kinds of situations. You are literally ready for anything. The same method can be found in the Hagakure, the manual of samurai ethics, which recommends imagining every combat situation, so as to be ready when the moment comes. Musicians draw on it too. Hélène Grimaud reports that at one point in her life her work took place less on the instrument than in her head. “I worked by thinking, by associating images, by mental projections and visions of architecture, and of colors. I steeped myself in them.” Visualization, then, is not necessarily immediately followed by action. You can set it to one side, or let it seep into you. Noah recommends that when you are training and finding it difficult to be in the moment, you should above all not insist. “Sometimes a walk in the forest when you’re relaxed and concentrating on the goal is much more useful than three hours of drills.”
Taking a walk is an art that consists of allowing walking to take over from thought and allowing your mind to wander. A true walk should have no goal other than itself. That way it will be much healthier. Rousseau tells us how his purest and most lasting moments of pleasure came to him while he was walking, strolling aimlessly, or lying in a boat, looking at the sky. This solitary meditation is based on an act of renunciation that, because it is sincere, turns out to be happy and fruitful. Reverie, meditation, walking, though it may not look like it, are never a waste of time. Ideas do not come because we pursue them, but because we are open to them. Once the mind is purified of its concerns, its tensions, clarity comes naturally.
Finally, the most important condition, the essential precondition of attention, is rest. André Breton tells us that before taking a nap, “Saint-Pol-Roux used to hang a sign on the door of his country house saying ‘POET AT WORK.’” The surrealists relied on sleep and dreams to find inspiration, breaking the straitjacket of the day’s binary logic. Recent scientific research confirms that sleeping allows the brain to work, or rather to infuse, absorbing both abstract information and new physical movements; sporting or artistic gestures, piano, tennis, or learning a language. Night not only brings counsel, it also opens new doors.
But to reap the benefits of sleep you must be able to sink into it. In a chapter devoted to insomnia, Alain defines the position of rest as “that in which there is no further to fall. The remedy is first to allow gravity to act, so that it has nothing left to act on. Become liquid.” What wakes you up is the feeling of falling. You must therefore find a position in which no part of your body can sink any lower. Otherwise the least movement becomes a warning and wakes us.
To become liquid is also to give up shaping any thoughts. Remember the sea, which teaches us that forms are not real, and which resists all our ideas. Knowing how to sleep means first of all sending our thoughts to sleep and stopping them from taking shape. Attending to your breath is a good way of achieving this. If necessary, the imagination comes to your aid. In particular, the imaginary world of water. Gaston Bachelard, author of the wonderful L’Eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams), lived in Place Maubert on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, which was a particularly noisy street. He tells us that one night, when he couldn’t sleep because of the constant noise of traffic, he began to imagine that the noise of the cars was that of waves. Cradled by this friendly sound, he dropped off happily, and was able to slip effortlessly into a deep slumber.