The Rarest Form of Generosity

In April 1942 a woman five weeks from leaving France for good wrote from Marseille — then still in the unoccupied zone — to a man in Carcassonne who had been in bed since 1918.

Joë Bousquet had been shot through the spine at Vailly-sur-Aisne on 27 May 1918, at twenty-one, and was paralysed from the chest down. After years of hospitals he took a room in the rue de Verdun and stayed: shutters closed at his own wish, lamps always lit, opium against the pain, and most of French letters passing through. Simone Weil was thirty-three. Jean Ballard, who edited the review they both published in, had put them in touch; she came once, in late March, and sat with him from eleven at night until three or four in the morning. Then she went away and wrote.

The letter contains the most quoted sentence in the modern literature on attention. It is quoted almost entirely without its situation, and the situation changes what it can mean.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

You will have seen it on a poster. It arrives now as a piece of encouragement, faintly therapeutic, the sort of thing recommended to people who look at their phones during dinner. Read it back into the room it was written for and the temperature drops.

Weil was not telling a distracted person to concentrate. She was writing to a man who had nothing left to give anyone — no mobility, no career, no future, no capacity to act at all — and telling him what he could still give, and that it was the rarest thing there is. She was also, in the same letter, being given it, and says so before she generalises: he had genuinely attended to the pages she showed him, and she calls that a free and generous gift. The aphorism is not a theory she brought with her. It is what she concluded from his having read her — as he then read the letter, lifting one sentence out of it and sending it back as the place their thinking should start.

That is the register the sentence belongs to. It is not advice about focus. It is a claim about what one person can do for another when everything else has been taken away.

There is a detail further down the same letter that settles it, and it is not a phrase but a substitution.

In the essay she was writing in those same weeks, Weil retells the story of the Grail. The Grail belongs to whoever first says to the guardian of the stone — a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful of wounds — What are you going through? In the essay the paralysed man is the one who gets asked. He is the image of affliction, and somebody else does the attending.

Then she wrote to Bousquet, who was that image exactly. And she gave him the other part. Only a predestined being, she tells him, has the capacity to ask another what his torment is, and he does not have it on entering life; he must pass through years of dark night, wandering in affliction, far from everything he loves, with the sense of being cursed. At the end of all that he receives the capacity to put such a question — and, she writes, he heals the suffering of others.

She looked at the man who was her own standing symbol for the person to whom things are done, and cast him as the one who does something.

The claim underneath it is stranger than the poster suggests, and three people arrive at it independently.

Start with William James, who put it most flatly in 1890, in a sentence that reads at first like a truism and then stops being one.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Not: my experience contains many things, from which attention selects. Taken at its word the sentence says something stronger — that there is no experience prior to the attending, and that what you attend to is not a portion of your experience but the whole of it.

Taken at its word. James is more careful than his own sentence, and the qualification sits two lines below it: without selective interest, experience would be an utter chaos — which concedes something is there to be chaotic. Elsewhere he names the fringe, the dim marginal awareness the strong reading has to deny. So the sentence is not quite his doctrine, and an essay recruiting him for the maximal claim is recruiting the epigram rather than the man. A century on, a good part of the field doubts attention is one thing at all. Cite him for the formulation, never as evidence. The same two volumes explain why the masculine brain is the more efficient one, and receive a page of Spencer on the cubic inches by which a European brain exceeds a Papuan's as doubtless containing a good deal of truth — he objects to the mechanism and lets the hierarchy stand. A serviceable reminder of what 1890 is.

Even the careful version does the work. Attention is not a spotlight moving across a room that exists anyway. It is at minimum what gives the room accent and emphasis, foreground and background — James's own words — and a room without those is not a room you could be said to be in.

Iris Murdoch took that and made it moral, in a book of three essays published in 1970 that did more than any other to put attention at the centre of Anglophone moral philosophy. Her example is domestic and unremarkable and it does more work than most thought experiments manage.

A mother-in-law, M, dislikes her son's wife, D. Not violently, and not coarsely: Murdoch is careful to say M finds her not exactly common, but unpolished, lacking in dignity and refinement, pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, tiresomely juvenile. M is a correct person and behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, never letting her real opinion show. Nobody would know.

Then — and this is the whole of the example — M decides that she may be wrong, and she looks again. Over time, and by an effort that costs her something, she comes to see the same person differently: not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful.

Nothing has happened. D has not changed, and Murdoch sharpens the case by supposing she may have moved away, or died. There has been no decision, no action, no observable event. M's outward behaviour, beautiful from the start, does not alter. And Murdoch's claim is that this is where nearly all of moral life takes place — not at the moment of choosing, but in the long unwatched work that determines what will be available to choose from when the moment comes. What you can do is limited by what you can see, and what you can see is the residue of how you have been looking.

Her name for the thing that does this work is a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality — the characteristic mark, she says, of the active moral agent. She is also more guarded than her admirers: M's new view, she notes, is accurate and truthful, while allowing that it need not have been. Looking again is not a guarantee of seeing better. It is only the condition of it.

Weil's own account of the mechanism is in an essay she wrote for a Dominican friend on the use of school studies, and it is the least sentimental thing anyone has written on the subject.

She begins from the claim that the intrinsic interest of schoolwork is secondary, that forming the faculty of attention is almost the whole point of studying, and that it hardly matters whether you solve the geometry problem — though you have to try in earnest, or nothing happens at all.

Then she says what attention is, and it is not what anyone expects.

It is not muscular effort. Tell a class to pay attention and they will frown, hold their breath, contract; ask them two minutes later what they were attending to and they cannot say. They were contracting their muscles. And because that tires them, they will believe they were working, which she calls an illusion — tiredness has nothing to do with work. Attention is an effort, she writes, perhaps the greatest of all efforts, but a negative one, and of itself it does not tire you.

What it consists of is suspension. Holding your thought available and empty and penetrable by the thing in front of you, and above all not reaching for anything, because the reaching is you and you are what has to get out of the way. Every error in a translation, she says, every absurdity in a proof, every clumsiness of style comes from the same cause: you wanted to be active, you went looking.

That is a strange doctrine and it may well be wrong. It is not, however, a doctrine about a resource. You cannot spend something whose exercise consists of not gripping. And it explains why the poster reading fails so completely: the effortful, virtuous, teeth-gritted thing the phrase now summons is precisely what she says attention is not.

One thing has to be said about where that account comes from, because leaving it out would be a kind of theft. Its opening sentence is that the key to a Christian conception of study is that prayer consists of attention; it was written for a Dominican priest, and it ends on that same Grail question. The theology is the frame, not the decoration. She also licenses the narrower reading, twice: quite apart from explicit religious belief, every effort of attention made with the sole aim of grasping truth better leaves you better at grasping it, even when it produces nothing visible — and near the end, that studies could have their full spiritual effect quite apart from any particular belief. So the essay is doing what she permitted, and that is worth saying out loud rather than hoping nobody checks.

So there are two ways to think about attention, and almost everything follows from which one you take.

The first is the one the language installs in you before you can examine it. You pay attention. It is a fund, it is finite, it is spent. On this account attention is a resource, giving it to someone is a cost you bear on their behalf, and the moral question is one of allocation.

The second is the one Weil and Murdoch and James are describing, and it is not a variation on the first. On this account attention is not a quantity at all. It is the relation that makes a thing real to you. It has no unit. You cannot bank it, and you cannot give someone a larger portion of it by giving someone else less.

L. M. Sacasas has put the sharpest version of the objection to the first framing: your attention is not a resource. Once it is a resource it has a market price, and it can be extracted, and the extraction can be optimized — which is a story an earlier transmission has told. What matters here is smaller and more personal.

You cannot give attention as a gift while you are thinking of it as a cost.

The moment you are aware of spending it, you are attending to the spending. That is the whole failure of quality time — the hour set aside, the phone in the drawer, the visible sacrifice — and why the people on the receiving end can always tell. Being attended to at expense is not the same experience as being attended to.

Which is what Weil means by generosity. Not that it costs a great deal. That it costs nothing, and is almost never done.

The essay has to be honest about the woman it opened on. She is a harder case than the poster admits.

Born into a Jewish family, she refused the identification and wrote at length and with hostility about Judaism and ancient Israel. The worst of it is in the notebooks Gustave Thibon published as Gravity and Grace, which has a chapter called "Israel" and none called "Rome": the Hebrews got the God they deserved, and the Jews are that handful of uprooted people who have uprooted the world. Her defenders are right that the same violence falls on Rome, and that The Need for Roots prosecutes Rome across a hundred pages and mentions the Jews three times. What indicts that book is smaller and worse: written in London in the weeks after the extermination was announced to the Commons, it strikes Judaism from the schools curriculum of a liberated France in a bracket, as linked to a racial conception.

And there is something heavier than the theology. In May 1938, four months before Munich, she published an argument that France should accept the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia rather than go to war — and wrote in it that the Czechs could ban the Communist Party and exclude the Jews from posts of any importance without losing anything of their national life. Injustice for injustice, she reasoned; choose the one less likely to bring on a war. She held to it until German troops entered Prague. Five years later, in a London notebook, she called it her criminal error — while blaming the migraines that had kept her from the pacifists' meetings, which is the one part of the reckoning that reads as an excuse.

Set that beside what she wrote the same year, back from Spain. When the temporal and spiritual authorities place a category of human beings outside those whose lives have a price, she told Bernanos, there is nothing more natural to man than to kill. She had the mechanism exactly. In the same twelve months she recommended a mild instance of it, in a policy sentence, about her own.

Her death is contested too. She died at Ashford in August 1943, at thirty-four; the certificate records cardiac failure from starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis. The inquest called it suicide, in the archaic formula that she did kill and slay herself while the balance of her mind was disturbed — a rider attached to almost every such verdict then, not a judgement on her. Her biographers have argued about it ever since; her doctors left no such argument. And streptomycin was not isolated until two months after she died: in August 1943 the whole treatment for tuberculosis was rest, air and a rich diet, so refusing food was refusing treatment, and there was nothing else to refuse. What is not in doubt is that she held herself to a standard that killed her, and would not have recommended it to anyone.

There is a real question in there the essay will not settle: whether the capacity she describes is a virtue or a symptom. Feminist readers have pressed the sharper version — that self-emptying is a strange thing to prescribe to anyone still fighting to be counted as a self. Sabina Lovibond extends the charge to Murdoch, who took the idea from Weil and made it a universal principle of conduct: for women, that asks them to perfect the other-orientedness they were raised into anyway. Her defenders reply that unselfing describes how consciousness works rather than who should yield — right about the philosophy, no answer to the politics. Neither writer is a model of a life. Weil emptied herself entirely and died of it; Murdoch, on the biographical record, did not live as she wrote. Take the sentences. The argument does not need either of them to have been good.

Two more recent writers have tried to say what this would mean for anyone not living in a shuttered room.

Jenny Odell's argument is that refusing the terms on which your attention is solicited is a political act, not a private indulgence, and that what looks like doing nothing is often the precondition for noticing anything. She puts the obvious objection to herself inside the book — she can sit in a rose garden in Oakland because her teaching keeps her on campus two days a week — and then declines it: a right most people are denied is not thereby less of a right — the argument the eight-hour-day movement made. What she conceded afterwards was narrower and truer: the thing unequally distributed is not attention but time, and she went away and wrote a second book about that.

Matthew Crawford's version is that attention is formed by what we do with our hands in a world that pushes back, and that the modern trouble is not distraction but an environment engineered to be manipulable and therefore to teach us nothing. The sharpest objection in print is not that this is nostalgic — that charge was aimed at his earlier book — but that he never asks what the skilled work is for: a workshop of apprentices serving a master craftsman is the model whether they are making pipe organs or pipe bombs.

He is also the best evidence the two senses do not sort neatly. Writing in a newspaper about this same book, Crawford calls attention a resource of which a person has only so much, and builds his proposal — an attentional commons, held like air or water — on precisely the premise Sacasas says gives the game away. The two most serious recent writers on the subject cannot agree about what kind of thing it is. Which is the reason the question is worth an essay.

Set all of it beside the line it started from and the shape becomes clear.

Attention is not the currency of care. It is the form care takes when there is nothing else. That is why Weil calls it the rarest and purest — not the most valuable, not the most costly, but the one that cannot be simulated, delegated, purchased, or performed. Everything else you do for someone can be done insincerely. This cannot. There is no counterfeit version of actually having seen a person.

And it is why the manifesto's word for it is not focus and not mindfulness but something older, with a second half that almost everyone drops.

Listening — the ability to overhear the world talking to itself, and to answer.

The answer is the part that matters and the part that gets forgotten. Attention as pure reception is not what any of these writers describe. Murdoch's M does not merely observe D more accurately; she is changed, and afterwards she treats her differently. James's attending is an act, with a verb. Weil's letter to Bousquet is a reply — she had read him, he had read her, and what she sent back could not have been sent to anyone else.

The letter is not a pure transmission either. In the same pages she presses him to send the written commentary he had promised on her scheme for a corps of front-line nurses, because she may leave within days; she encloses most of the third act of her play and asks him to keep it in case she dies; and she offers to fetch a medicine he needs from Marseille. The purest documented instance of the thing arrives braided with a request, a bequest and an errand. That is not a flaw in the example. It is what it looks like when two people are actually doing it. Nor did she leave him with the compliment: in the letters that follow she tells him his taste for reverie blurs good and evil, and that to think affliction you must carry it in your flesh. She thought, in the end, that he was dreaming his life.

That is the test, and it is a good one because it cannot be faked. Not whether you were quiet while someone spoke. Whether what you said next could have been said to anybody.

Bousquet stayed in the room. He lived another seven years and died there in September 1950, having published and corresponded throughout. Weil sailed from Marseille in May — for Morocco, not America; the Atlantic crossing was from Casablanca in June — then New York, then London, and was dead sixteen months after she wrote to him.

They met properly once. She wrote him a letter about what the afflicted can still give, and he kept it, and it survived them both, and it is now the sentence people put on posters without knowing that it was written by one person in a hurry to a person who could not move.

Two people who could not do anything for each other, doing the only thing there was.