The Socrates Express

A sickly toddler, Simone Weil grew into a sickly young adult. At age thirteen, she began to suffer acute, debilitating headaches that would torment her throughout her life. At times the pain was so bad she’d wedge her head in a pile of pillows. Her birdlike appetite didn’t help. She would go days without eating, and may have suffered from anorexia.

The Weils were a family of germophobes. (A bacteriologist was a close family friend, which didn’t help.) Weil’s mother insisted her children wash their hands several times a day, open doors with their elbows, and never kiss anyone. Not surprisingly, Simone Weil grew into an adult who flinched at the thought of physical contact. She once signed a letter to a friend, “Affectionate and bacilli-free kisses.”

Brilliant as she was, Weil felt overshadowed by her wunderkind brother, André, who would go on to become one of Europe’s greatest mathematicians. Clearly, her parents had wished for a second genius son. They sometimes referred to Simone as “Simon” and “our son number two.”

From a young age, Weil experienced the pain of others as if it were her own. At age six, as World War I raged, she announced she was forsaking sugar because “the poor soldiers at the front didn’t have any.” Later, as a young adult, she refused to heat her apartment, out of sympathy for the workers who couldn’t afford heating fuel. She insisted on sleeping on hard floors. For a while, she worked in a vineyard harvesting grapes and in a factory, doing the most tedious assembly line work. “The affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul,” she wrote.

Weil broke into tears upon hearing news of a famine in China. This deeply impressed fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. “I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world,” she recalled. The two Simones, giants of twentieth-century French philosophy, and women in what was, and to an extent still is, very much a boys’ club, met in 1928 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. They did not get along.

Weil’s radical empathy helps explain her radical views on attention. She didn’t see it as a mechanism, or a technique. For her, attention was a moral virtue, no different from, say, courage or justice, and demanding the same selfless motivation. Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do.

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,” writes Weil. Only when we give someone our attention, fully and with no expectation of reward, are we engaged in this “rarest and purest form of generosity.” This is why the attention denied by a parent or lover stings the most. We recognize the withdrawal of attention for what it is: a withdrawal of love.

In the end, our attention is all we have to give. The rest—money, praise, advice—are poor substitutes. So, too, is time. Giving someone your time but not your attention is the cruelest fraud of all. Children know this instinctively. They can smell bogus attention a mile away.

Pure attention is not easy, Weil concedes: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Our first impulse when confronted with suffering is to turn away. We make excuses. We’re busy. I’ve been known to cross the street to avoid earnest solicitors raising money for a no-doubt worthy cause. When I spot one, clipboard in hand, smile lighting her face, I shrink, ashamed not by my cheapness but, rather, my attentional impotence, my inability to look suffering in the eye.

It doesn’t take much, says Weil. A simple five-word question can soften a heart, and change a life: “What are you going through?” These words are so powerful, says Weil, because they recognize the sufferer, “not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”

There’s a busy intersection near my home in Silver Spring, Maryland, where on most days, but especially on Sundays, an elderly African American man named Chip stands on the traffic island. He rests his thin frame on a walking stick, Styrofoam cup in one hand, cardboard sign in the other. It says simply, “Chip.” No story. No pitch. Just his name.