The Socrates Express

Rail stations, even bad ones, pulse with life in a way that airports, even good ones, do not. They are training grounds for attention. This has been true from the beginning. One painting, from 1862, captures the vivacity of the rail station. Called simply The Railway Station, by William Frith, it depicts a frenzied scene, or scenes, unfolding on the platform. Porters, young ruddy-skinned men, haul huge suitcases onto trains. A passenger adjusts the collar on one of his two dogs. A wedding party, complete with bridesmaids, prepares to board. Two Scotland Yard detectives arrest a criminal. A bearded man in a fur coat, a Venetian nobleman, haggles over his cab fare.

Viewing the painting, my attention fragments. Splinters. That is the nature of attention, right? It is like a feral cat, a wild savanna lioness that must be “captured,” not by us but by outside agents, like Scotland Yard detectives cuffing a fugitive. Maybe, maybe not.

Today’s St. Pancras Station features no Venetian noblemen or Victorian bridesmaids. Yet currents of energy still pulse through its departures hall and through the ticket counters and cafés. There is nothing stationary about a train station. Everyone is in motion.

Everyone but me. I have planted myself at a little coffee shop. I order an overpriced espresso and find a seat that overlooks the action.

I reach into my bag, a waxed canvas and leather beauty, and retrieve a collection of Weil’s writing. I turn to her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” It’s a curious title. Weil was profoundly, if unconventionally, spiritual, and she frames many of her ideas in religious terms. Her work resonated with Pope Paul VI. But you needn’t be a pope or religious at all to appreciate Weil’s wisdom. No less an unbeliever than Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time.” He spent an hour meditating in her Paris apartment before boarding the plane for Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for literature.

The essay is short, only eight pages, but it takes me a long time to read it. I start and stop, then start again. Each reading produces a different shade of meaning, like a crystal that appears as different colors, depending on how the light strikes it. The essay is arresting, demanding. Weil begins by telling me I know nothing. Attention is not what I think it is.

Attention is not concentration. Concentration can be coerced—listen up, class!—while attention cannot. Observe what happens to your body when you concentrate. Your jaw tightens, your eyes narrow, your brow furrows. Weil found this sort of muscular effort ridiculous.

Concentration constricts. Attention expands. Concentration tires. Attention rejuvenates. Concentration is focused thinking. Attention is thinking suspended. “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” Weil writes. If that statement isn’t perplexing enough, Weil goes further, declaring that “all errors arise from a lack of passivity.”

Really? Isn’t it an excess of passivity that bedevils? That is certainly what our culture teaches. We assume the active person is paying attention and the passive one is somehow clueless.

No, says Simone Weil. Attention is not something we do so much as consent to. Less weight lifting, more yoga. “Negative effort,” she called it. Genuine attention, she believed, is a kind of waiting. For Weil, the two are virtually the same. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” The opposite of attention is not distraction but impatience.

Don’t seek solutions. Wait for them. The more you scan your brain for the “right” word, the more it eludes you. Wait for it, though, and it will come. Eventually.

Speed is the enemy of attention. Of all the indecencies she witnessed on the factory floor, the greatest, Weil thought, was the violation of the workers’ attention. The conveyor belt moved at a velocity “incompatible with any other kind of attention since it drains the soul of all save a preoccupation with speed.”

We pay attention only to what we consider worthy of our attention. On one level, this mental triage is necessary, lest our lives become, in the words of William James, “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” But it comes at a cost. By triaging too quickly, too impulsively, we risk overlooking precious gems.

Just as we often rush to judgment, so, too, do we rush to attention. We latch on to an object or idea too quickly, and pay a price: a flash of beauty, or an act of kindness, not seen. That’s why, says Weil, it’s important to maintain a state of unknowing, of unthinking, for as long as possible. This requires patience, something scarce during Weil’s time and even more so today.

Weil paid great attention to matters most of us consider trivial. Handwriting, for instance. In high school, relays her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, Weil decided to reform her “sloppy, almost careless, scrawled handwriting.” She worked at it tirelessly, attentively, despite headaches and frequently swollen and painful hands. Her scrawl grew “progressively less rigid and more supple and, finally, attained the pure, beautiful script of her last years.”