Awakening Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridgesaid that poetry awakens the mind’s attention  

from the lethargy of custom… directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

There is, surely, no place where this awakening is more necessary than schools. I have been rereading Simone Weil, a thinker who can shake awake even the most somnolent. She asks, in her essay “Human Personality,” what prevents us from hurting a fellow being:

What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man’s eyes out if I am allowed to do so  and if it takes my fancy?

 Although it is the whole of him that is sacred to me, he is not sacred in all respects and from every point of view.  He is not sacred in as much as he happens to have long arms, blue eyes, or possibly commonplace thoughts.  Nor as a duke, if he is one; nor as a dustman, if that is what he is. Nothing of all this would stay my hand.

What would stay it is the knowledge that if someone were to put out his eyes, his soul would be lacerated by the thought that harm was being done to him.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being…there is something that goes on indominantly expecting…that good and not evil will be done to him. 

Too often, although we now stay our hand, we lacerate souls in schools. Why? Some people, Weil argues, get pleasure from hurting others, but most are simply unaware (they have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand). What is necessary, she says, is an “attentive silence,” because, although the soul blows, too, always provoke a cry – why am I being hurt? – “it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the secret heart.”

The noise of schools, though, is deafening. We hurry down familiar halls to solve the problems we have created, advancing, progressing, pressing forward, organizing our streams of data, our information linked, layered, stacked, prioritized to implement, to achieve, to perform. There is no room for silence. We rush to fill it.

Even here the silence presses in on us until we click our way out of it.

And in our secret hearts, the silent cry. Who, now, is generous enough to attend?