Rain for days. Biblical rain, lashing the boulevards with deep pools of water. Cars creep along cautiously, but still splash the few pedestrians waiting to cross on the curb. By the third day, the sunshine city has passed into deep torpor. I’m on the sofa in our sublet, living out of a suitcase, reading about Simone Weil, of all people. No life could seem more distant, more incomprehensible, from my current vantage point, somewhere in West Hollywood. And yet, I am reading her essays, her journals, the biographies written about her, searching for scraps, for clues. I’m scouring these pages because of a single sentence she once wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That line, recorded more than half a century before, had been with me for years. It was indelible. With one sentence, Weil elevated attention outside of the self, raising the stakes to nothing less than how we treat each other.
But I do want to mention one more thing belonging to the difficult year of 2018. As strange and disconcerting as the endless days of rain felt, just one month before, we had passed a much more surreal weekend. That was the weekend when Malibu burned in the Woolsey Fire, one of the worst in the history of the area. In West Hollywood, we were thirty miles from the flames, but by Saturday afternoon, day two of the fire’s uncontained progression, the sky turned a color I had never seen before: best described as burnt sienna, the sun blazing ominously from behind gauzy layers of orange brown. As evacuees came down from the canyons, waiting for word on whether their homes would be spared, Josh and I crept tentatively out of the apartment we were staying in. We had an incongruous mission that day: we had to buy wedding rings. Unsure of how or if to proceed, we stopped to get paper face masks at the drugstore. I wanted to cover my nose and mouth. So attired, we drifted with the crowds toward the Grove, the pristine outdoor mall behind the farmers’ market. It was right about when we arrived that white ash began falling from the sky. I had the thought that this was the closest I was likely to get to seeing snow in Los Angeles. Josh and I watched the shoppers and pedestrians continue their happy rounds, as if oblivious to the ash falling into their hair.
These are the details of our time and place; this is the era to which we belong. We take to Instagram and Twitter with outrage and righteousness; we ban plastic straws and attempt to shame beef eaters. And we continue with our lives: We buy wedding rings. We conceive babies. It’s the attentional paradox of all time: we continue to believe in the future, even while we know what we know. Our world is burning.
What do you do with the truth that you see? What action does attention require? No one I had come across in all my attention research had such a clear reply to this as Simone Weil did. It is all over her short life story, embedded in every biographical detail: Weil believed it was necessary to give absolutely everything.
Weil, once you know about her, has a way of endearing herself, of seducing, through the sheer force of her words. In life, she was intense, single-minded. She provoked extreme loyalty in her friends, family, and students; she cut people out who didn’t rise to her standards. I struggle with her character, puzzle over it, chafe against her extremes. But her writing reverberates through the years, shimmering with infinite meaning.
She was born a doctor’s daughter, a privileged Jewish girl in Paris. By the end of her short life, she’d be, at different times, a self-described Bolshevik, factory worker, philosopher, mystic, and Christian, yet one who never joined the Church, was never baptized, and admired and learned from the East. Weil abhorred wealth and was repelled by sex and physical touch. She was chaste her entire life. It was Albert Camus who called her “the only great spirit of our times.”
Weil was brilliant, flying through her education years ahead of schedule. She was lucky to be born to a family who embraced and enabled her intellect. Her older brother André, who would later become a famous mathematician, taught her everything he learned. Her parents, and especially her mother, Selma, were their daughter’s fierce champions, even as Simone’s oddities became more and more pronounced. They did not prevent her from acting on her convictions. Simone wore potato sack–inspired ensembles, often stained with ink; her choice of clothing came from her deep sympathy with the working class. Her biographer the late Francine du Plessix Gray described how, at the age of eleven, Simone went missing one afternoon, only to be discovered a few boulevards away, marching with an unemployed workers’ protest movement. From a young age, Weil was acutely aware of the inequalities built into her own society and the suffering that resulted. At her own insistence, she spent a summer of her adolescence performing hard manual labor on a fishing boat. A bespectacled, bookish teenager, Simone was not to be denied. This was all the more incongruous because of her physical delicacy: Weil could rarely bring herself to eat more than a few mouthfuls of food and was, throughout her entire life, alarmingly thin.
Weil, like Wallace, like Huxley and William James too, believed in the unsurpassed power of attention. She returned to it again and again in her thoughts, in her writing, and, especially, in her life as an activist. She believed that paying attention could never be a wasted effort. “If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension,” she writes. “We may not have solved the geometry problem, but our attention itself, the very effort of it, pays off.
“Perhaps he who made the unsuccessful effort will one day be able to grasp the beauty of a line of Racine more vividly on account of it,” for example. “Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”
In this essay, Weil was writing from her experience in the schoolroom. She had taught in several outposts, all of them far away from Paris, as was traditional for graduates of the elite École normale supérieure. So it was from her vantage as teacher that she wrote: “Most often attention is confused with a muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: ‘Now you must pay attention,’ one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles.” But in fact, Weil concludes, this is entirely beside the point, even counter to it. “They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.”
What they’re missing in the flexing of muscles are attention’s essential ingredients: Joy. Curiosity. “The intelligence can only be led by desire,” she writes. She is describing the ideal classroom, the ideal method of instruction, but by the end of this short essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” she has left the classroom behind. She is addressing herself to attention on a cosmic scale when she writes, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’ ” She believes that “only he who is capable of attention can do this.”
What are you going through? It’s a simple question, but I find it to be one of the most moving lines anywhere in Weil’s many volumes of writing.
It was in the pursuit of such attentiveness, such desire to directly understand the experience of others, that Weil was forever rejecting what could have been a comfortable, upper-middle-class life. At twenty-five, frail and afflicted by agonizing headaches, she decided to spend a year working hard labor in various factory jobs in Paris. She believed she had to directly understand what the working class experienced to ever write or say anything valid on the subject. Her time on the factory floor changed her. For the rest of her life, she said, when someone spoke to her “without brutality,” she assumed it was by mistake.
But she was closer to answering her eternal question: What are you going through?
She was a citizen of her age, entirely, active, observing. In 1932, just twenty-three years old, she had gone to Berlin to see how the Communist Party was faring in Germany. What she saw, with incredible prescience, was Hitler’s unimpeded path to power. She came home and published an article predicting the rise of Nazis. A year later, it had come true. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she quickly left for the front, to fight the fascists (a bad foot injury there likely saved her life).
Weil’s perceptions are profound even now, but the facts of her life can be mystifying, even alienating. At every turn, she seems to go too far: the self-starvation, the avoidance of sex and disgust with all physicality, the constant courting of death in her work as an activist. And then, in her twenties, a new twist: her religious conversion. She was sitting in the Solesmes Abbey, just before Easter, 1938, suffering from a bad migraine. But “by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh,” she writes in “Spiritual Autobiography,” “to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words.” Christ inhabited her soul that day, she would later say.
This, for a hopelessly secular, iPhone-owning city dweller like me is very hard to process, very hard to identify with. I don’t know what to do with it. My entire education and culture bias me against such a turn of events. But strangely, if I look closely at my own reaction, I can see that I’m the tiniest bit jealous: jealous of the capacity to believe as Weil believed.
As World War II raged and Hitler closed in, Weil wrote and read furiously. She had fled from Paris to Marseille with her parents, and this is where they stayed, the three Weils in limbo, awaiting visas that would grant them escape from Nazi-occupied France. In these strained, uncertain circumstances, Weil wrote such things in her notebook as: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” For Weil, attention was the all-powerful act. She had, of course, radically raised the attention standard, taken the mandate of “paying attention” to a new extreme. “There should not be the slightest discrepancy between one’s thoughts and one’s way of life,” Weil wrote. It is this sentence that perhaps best summarizes her time on this earth. And this is the thing about studying Weil. One must ask oneself, whether one wants to or not: What counts? What is enough?
Weil has inspired many of her readers to action. Susan Sontag, for example, passionately admired Weil, writing in The New York Review of Books that Weil was “the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.” In some real sense, Sontag seemed to model herself on Weil: on her intensity, her uncompromising essays, her activism. Was she thinking of Weil when, a few months before her death, she walked onto a stage in South Africa and told the crowd that all writers must “pay attention to the world”?
Yet Sontag also conceded that for almost all of Weil’s readers, it would be neither possible nor necessary to copy her extremity, to follow her to all of the uncomfortable places she went. “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves,” Sontag continued in her essay. Rather, Sontag believed that “we read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their ‘views.’ ”
Weil ate less and less. She cited the deprivations of the French soldiers as moral justification for her own eating disorder. Her behavior was growing ever more extreme. She now refused to sleep in beds, or with heat, choosing instead to freeze on the floor. Why should she have comfort when the soldiers did not?
When the Weils’ visas came through, Simone sailed with her parents for New York. She knew they wouldn’t leave Europe without her and that, as Jews, remaining in France would threaten their lives. In New York, the Weils took an apartment on Riverside Drive, near Columbia. But after a few months, Simone couldn’t stand it. She had to return to Europe, to fight with the resistance. As she left for what they all knew might be the last time, she told her stricken parents: “If I had several lives, I would have devoted one of them to you, but I have only one life.”
Throughout her final months, she wrote to her parents from England. She was sick and getting sicker, but she never let on how bad her health was, writing letters full of bravado, so that they did not suspect, did not rush to catch a ship as they might otherwise have done, even in wartime. I am already older than Weil was when she died. She lived to be thirty-four, passing away in an English sanitarium from tuberculosis. The only available cure for it was to eat and sleep, but Weil, in her hospital bed, refused to consume any more than what she believed the French soldiers were given on the front lines of the war. To the end, she lived her convictions. Indeed: they killed her.
So what are we to do with a story like Weil’s? Are we to follow her lead and walk the plank, sacrificing ourselves so entirely to the world, to the problems and catastrophes of our own age? The true act of paying attention, Weil argued in “Reflections,” was one of self-sacrifice, self-erasure. “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.” I have to admit that I am not prepared to do anything like this. That often, when reading accounts about Weil, I am left cold and sad. I am much more in the Huxley camp. It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.
But still, Weil’s words echo in my mind.
that we choose the people we write about, out of a vast sea of possibilities, because we find points of identification with them, and that those commonalities, however small, confirm our earliest hunches and spur us on. All through my research, I discovered synchronous biographical overlaps or shared obsessions or both with all of them, all of my attention-minded writers and thinkers, my attention touchstones.
David Foster Wallace was the most obvious. He bridged the gap between attention and addiction; his worries over modern technology mirrored my own. The more I read him, the closer he became. I could shut my eyes and see and hear and smell the bright yellow ball leaving his racket on the tennis courts at Amherst. After all, he was a citizen of the same historical age that I belong to, so that I was alive, hurrying across Union Square on a beautiful bright September day in New York when I got the news that he was dead. It arrived via text message from my friend Dave, the same Dave who had taken me to the emergency room in a New England snowstorm when I was twenty-one, overdosing on Adderall. When I got that text message, I didn’t know David Foster Wallace’s work yet, not really, but I was stunned, and somehow gutted, and I had to sit down on a bench for a minute or two, catch my breath, as the downtown bustle continued around me.
But it has also been true for those not remotely of my historical moment as well, such as William James, who had lived part of his childhood in Manhattan, a few blocks away from Union Square, in fact, who wanted to define himself out from under his father’s sense of who he should be. Huxley, like James, had a family legacy he was always aware of, even burdened by. Perhaps it was partly this line of inheritance that caused him to immigrate to the American West Coast, leaving England and all that was bound up with it, to arrive at the exact same corner of North Kings Road where my brother would, six decades later, take up residence. And, of course, Simone Weil, a Jewish girl born in a vibrant cultural capital with a fiercely tight bond to her mother, Selma Weil, a powerful woman with a clear vision of how things could be, of what could be possible. A mother who reminded me so much of my own.
Weil had inherited a long tradition of a particular kind of attention. In her deepest, most instinctual self, she embodied what had long been seen as attention’s highest function: to concentrate on God. And, actually, what occurred to me rather late in the day, only after I’d mostly finished my research, after I’d already lived awhile with Wallace, James, Huxley, and Weil in my head, was this: all four of them were irretrievably drawn to the question of belief. Huxley, directly descended from the man who invented the term “agnostic,” nevertheless circled religion for years, experimenting with Vedantic Hinduism, devoting his brilliance to writing The Perennial Philosophy, searching for the commonalities among different religions. William James’s most abiding masterpiece to date being, of course, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Even Wallace, who might seem the least likely candidate, had in fact tried to join the Catholic Church, at least once, and addressed the question of belief in multiple ways.
I wondered about what the connection might be, the dual fascination: how to attend and how to believe. The poet Mary Oliver died just as I was buried in all things Simone Weil, pondering her legacy. One of Oliver’s great themes, of course, was paying attention: to the natural world in particular. In the days after her death, I read through the outpouring of tributes to Oliver’s life and work going up online, noting how much her emphasis on attention itself seemed to matter to people, to move them.
For its modesty, its everyday detail, I loved her poem “Praying”:
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
It makes perfect sense, then, that it was Oliver who wrote “attention is the beginning of devotion.” It’s as simple as that, maybe. I think again of the eighteenth-century naturalists, staring all day at their aphids and bees. Eventually, the very force of their attention elevated those tiny insects to beloved, even sacred, objects. Through the power and consistency of their own attention, they fell in love with their bugs.
There was this to consider, as well: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Weil wrote that. I often think about what she meant. To pay attention is to believe there is something worth paying attention to. Even if you don’t yet know of what it consists. Even if it hasn’t been preselected by an algorithm to play to your interests. Even if it might hurt or disappoint you, scandalize you with its sensibility, or defy you entirely.
Still, blindly, you devote yourself.
When I think of moments of pure attention, one memory often comes back to me: sitting cross-legged on a red leather booth in an Italian restaurant at midnight. This was Brooklyn, late in the winter, not so long ago. Steamy windows against a freezing black night. I was busy asking Josh, my soon-to-be boyfriend, a thousand questions about his childhood, devouring his every reply. This despite being at similar tables, at similar restaurants many times before, with different men, with whom it hadn’t worked out. Sometimes quite painfully so. Nevertheless, we do this, don’t we? Manage to find new hope, new capacities for curiosity? That night, my attention was effortless. Entire. This was love, the beginning of love. He is my husband now.