Giving Attention and World Peace

One night last weekend, I was sitting in the living room, which was lit only by the Christmas tree, some lights among the Santas on the mantle, and my task light, listening to Handel's Messiah and hand piecing a sunflower block, when something in my brain exploded, connecting giving attention and world peace in the most unlikely, but perhaps the most meaningful way.  Let me try to trace my thinking.

First, there was my last blog post which encouraged you, during this time of global violence and instability, during a time when "brain rot" is the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, to think about where you gave your attention.  Don McKay brought this reframing to me when he was editing Visible Cities, and it changes the whole economy.  We "pay" attention like we pay our bills or pay for a coffee--a little casually, a little unthinkingly.  It's only money. But if we "give" attention, we realize that our attention is a gift--both to ourselves and to the particulars of the world we are attending to.

At the same time, I was reading two entirely disparate books that had attention at their centres. One was Matt Haig's The Life Impossible, in which the 72-year-old retired school teacher and widow, Grace Winter, travels to the island of Ibiza to check out a house she has apparently inherited from an old friend.  I should say that when Grace became a widow, she lost the single thing in life to which she gave her attention.  This was because she casually refused to drive her son to the local shops on a rainy day, her attention being elsewhere, and his bicycle collided with a bus. Grieving a child's death is one of the most difficult things parents are called on to do, and I don't think we can criticize anyone for the way in which they navigate a loss that is both emotional and existential.  What can you do with the infinite hole that is the loss of a child? What has the universe become that it can take away a child? Its indifference, if not its malignity, is manifest.  Grace's strategy is to make her world smaller and smaller, dividing it into manageable chunks, by paying attention to as little as possible, unspooling her days watching anodyne, bland TV. 

Like Matt Haig's wildly popular The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible involves supernatural events that are really metaphors for life's challenges and opportunities.  While scuba diving in order to investigate the death of the friend who willed Grace her house, she is touched by a supernatural light that sometimes springs from the ocean and gives people extraordinary powers. Grace now knows what people are thinking, has access to bits and pieces of their past, understands the agitation of lobsters in a tank and manages to break it from a distance, forces a seriously unpleasant man complaining about food at a restaurant to plunge his fork repeatedly into his thigh.  For Grace--probably for anyone waking up from a "seizure" while scuba diving--these powers are deeply disturbing.  The world becomes too much, demanding too much of her attention.  But she manages to focus it on a developer who wants to destroy part of Ibiza with a hotel and spa, saving the landscape and the species he'd like to eradicate from the island, from his insanely destructive plans.  Giving attention where she thinks it will be useful, she manages to tame it but also to unleash its ethical power. And giving attention returns meaning to her life.

Simone Weil, who is apparently having a moment, couldn't be more different from Grace.  While I am revising my novel, Home in Storm Weather, I am re-reading Weil and scholarship on Weil because one of my characters, a history student, is working on an honours paper about the French philosopher.  Waiting in my doctor's office, I came across an essay in The Drift  by Jackson Hanson called "Whose Weil?  Simone Weil, Patron Saint of Everyone," in which he looks at current thought about Weil. He almost makes the argument that you can get Simone Weil's life and thought to make sense only if you ignore a lot. One of the best of the recent books on Weil, Hanson tells us, is A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone's Simone Weil, which she wrote for the Oxford University Press very short introduction series.  Perhaps that is because Rozelle-Stone divides her attention thematically rather than chronologically, which allows her to dive deeply into, say, Weil's ethics or into her belief in beauty.  And the first chapter is, of course, on attention.  There were a number of good reasons for this, not the least of which one of Weil's most famous quotations:  "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."  

Let me give you only a handful of examples.  When Weil was five and Europe was in the midst of World War I, she and her brother Andre "adopted" a handful of soldiers who had no family, sending them most of their rations of sugar and all of their chocolate. Weil herself gathered wood, which her parents would pay her for, spending the proceeds on care packages for the soldiers.  She was one of the first women, along with Simone de Beauvoir, to be admitted to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, where she came first in the philosophy exams.  Afterward, she taught in small schools around France, often getting into trouble for her involvement in politics, before quitting teaching altogether and taking up factory work. She was a hopeless labourer, slow and awkward and frequently fired.  But she paid attention.  For two summers in the late sixties and early seventies I worked ten hours a day in a factory--$1.69 an hour becomes a luxurious $2.39 an hour at the end of the day--and I can tell you that she paid attention.  She fully understood the exhausting tedium of factory work that left the worker little energy for anything above survival at the end of the day.  That came to inform her vision for a post-war France Charles de Gaulle asked her to conceive when she was working with him and the Free French in London, The Need for Roots.

She died paying attention.  Diagnosed with tuberculosis while working with the Free French, she was told to eat well.  Yet she continued attempting to live on what Parisians were given to eat when Paris was occupied by Nazis.  The coroner said she refused food while the balance of her mind was disturbed; others thought she starved herself in an attempt at Christ-like self-erasure that coloured her life; her closest friend said that she simply couldn't eat at the end of her life. Her first English biographer, Richard Reese sums up the controversy by saying "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love." Her life and her choices are obviously not the best argument for paying attention.  A feminist lens might place her with the nineteenth-century heroines who are simply too good to live, goodness being synonymous with a species of passivity.  So they die in childbirth or languish with consumption.

But the recent interest in her philosophy, and Hanson's question "Whose Weil?" suggests she fascinates at this historical moment for some reason.  Is it because we live in a time when egotism and grievance have gotten out of control and we seek a counterweight? She has given me a question that I ask when I'm struggling with walking.  Yesterday at the Lawson, I took my tenth fall of the year, brought over by nothing but my right leg's reluctance to lift itself above the sticky track.  My own toes brought me down.  And I can get rather self-pitying until I see someone whose struggles are so much greater than mine.  Then I ask, with Simone Weil, "What are you going through?" Her question turns self-pity and fear into empathy. 

But I promised a connection to Handel's Messiah, and I'm going to keep my promise.  As I hand-pieced my cheerful sunflower block I thought about these two women and their ideas about attention.  And then the biblical texts chosen for Messiah inserted themselves between these thoughts, with their emphasis, first on human and political arrogance and then on peace.  And came the thunderclap.  In our everyday lives, we can create peace by paying attention, often to people who are labouring in invisibility or different from ourselves.