The Art of Attention

By: L.M. Sacasas

L.M. Sacasas is the Executive Director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and the author of the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and moral life.

There’s a well-known story you may have heard about the time G. K. Chesterton was asked what book he would want to have with him if he were stranded on a desert island. While most of us might be tempted to respond in a way that demonstrated our piety or perhaps our sophisticated literary sensibilities, Chesterton took another approach. “Thomas’ Guide to Practical Shipbuilding,” he quipped. Taking into consideration the literal sense of the question if, perhaps, not its spirit, this was an eminently useful suggestion. It directly addressed the problem implied in the question—you’re stuck on a desert island!—which I suspect most respondents would have ignored.

There are, no doubt, many honest and compelling answers to the question of what every university and college student needs to learn that are worthy of our consideration, three of which have already preceded mine. And this is to say nothing of how I, too, might be tempted to respond in a manner that exemplified my piety and intellectual sophistication. But with Chesterton’s facetious answer in mind, I would propose a practical response, one which, like Chesterton’s, addresses an unspoken problem.

So, what does every university and college student need to learn? I submit that every university and college student needs to learn how to pay attention.

Perhaps it might be better to say that every university and college student needs to learn how to practice the art of attention. Maybe this less familiar phrasing will better suggest the nature and quality of the skill–we might even say the virtue–that is in view. Attention is not merely a matter of sustained concentration or a cognitive capacity. It is a mode of perception, a condition of the soul, a way of being in the world that involves the heart, the body, and the spirit as much as the mind. The art of attention, like any art, is a matter of training, practice, and instruction.

The implicit problem in the question posed to Chesterton was the fact that you were stranded on an island. I would argue that the implicit problem in the question before us is that unless we are quite intentional about cultivating the virtue of attention, all of us, not just college students, will find it increasingly difficult to learn anything at all. The skill of attending well is the precondition of all learning, and we can no longer presume that any of us can deploy it as a matter of course. Given the formation most of us will undergo as we participate in the liturgies of the modern techno-economic order, it would be safer to presume that our capacity for attention has been severely attenuated.

As a writer and teacher, I have been reflecting on the theme of attention for nearly fifteen years. It’s fair to say that over that timespan there has been a growing awareness of the challenges posed by our social structures to the cultivation of attention. Over the last five to seven years in particular, numerous books, articles, and essays have come out exploring the problem of attention and distraction from various perspectives. Most of these have rightly focused on the ubiquity of digital devices and how these devices, along with so much of the software they support, have been designed to elicit compulsive engagement. This compulsive engagement encourages patterns of behavior and forms our habits of mind and heart.

The consequences of this kind of pervasive malformation were well illustrated in “Harrison Bergeron,” a dystopian short story first published in 1961 by the American writer Kurt Vunnegut. In the story, an authoritarian regime committed to the ideal of total equality deployed various techniques by which the gifts and talents of the more exceptional members of society would be neutralized. The physically gifted, for example, would be encumbered with weights that would severely limit their ability. The intellectually gifted, however, were dealt with in a different but similarly debilitating manner. They were forced to wear “a little mental handicap radio” in their ear, which would periodically emit harsh and blaring noises. In this way, they were kept from thinking deeply and at length. It was a condition of enforced distraction for the sake of enforced equality.

I’m sure you can see where I am going with this. But, in fact, I would argue that Vonnegut ultimately erred in the same way that Neil Postman would later argue that Orwell had been wrong about his own dystopian vision. In 1984, Orwell imagined that despotism would be enforced from above. As Postman pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World presented the more realistic scenario: the dystopia would not be imposed by totalitarian means, it would be freely embraced. Likewise, no one has forced us to wear a device that blares a distracting noise in our ear every few minutes. Instead, we have chosen to carry around devices that achieve the same effect in a far more pleasing and ostensibly beneficent manner. Of course, there are also many facets of our material environment that we have little to no power over that also contribute to our decreasing capacity for attention. But we have, by and large, freely chosen to live in a state of continuous partial attention, to borrow researcher Linda Stone’s phrase.

We must create contexts within the university in which students learn how to cultivate the art of attention like they still do with the skills of writing and mathematics.

So what is to be done? We must, I would argue, create contexts within the university in which students learn how to cultivate the art of attention like they still do with the skills of writing and mathematics.

Over a decade ago, Jennifer Roberts, a historian of art at Harvard University, argued along these lines in an essay titled “The Power of Patience.” “During the past few years,” Roberts observed, “I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses.” This essay was published in 2013, which means that “the past few years” to which Roberts alludes correspond to the advent of the smartphone era.

“In the process of designing a syllabus,” Roberts went on to explain, “I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences.” She added that wanted to “focus today on the slow end of this tempo spectrum, on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention.” According to Roberts, “these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available ‘in nature,’ as it were.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the need to cultivate the art of attention is not merely a phenomenon of the digital age. In the early 20th century, the French mystic and activist, Simone Weil, claimed in a short reflection on the purpose Christian education that the whole goal of education was simply to cultivate our attention.

“The key to a Christian conception of studies,” Weil reasoned, “is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”

She goes on to argue that, as a consequence, “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.” I’m not sure that I am prepared to reduce the whole of education to the cultivation of attention, but Weil makes a strong case. She understood that attention was at the heart of not only our intellectual life, but our moral and spiritual lives as well. In what may be her most famous claim, Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” as well as the key element of a life of prayer.

And Weil was not alone among 20th century thinkers in her desire to see the art of attention explicitly cultivated. In his classic guide for would-be Christian academics, The Intellectual Life, the Catholic priest A. G. Sertillanges also urged students to cultivate their attention. “Do you want to do intellectual work?” he asks. “Begin by creating within you a zone of silence,” he answers. This zone of silence was essentially an inner capacity for attentive contemplation, which was indispensable to the work of a student. “On what, first and foremost, does all the effort of study depend?” Sertillanges asks his readers in discussing the role of virtue in education. “On attention,” he answers, “which delimits the field for research, concentrates on it, brings all our powers to bear on it.”

Finally, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture also gives us a way to think about what is at stake when we talk about attention. Pieper described leisure as “a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.” “It is, in the first place,” Pieper argues, “an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul.”

I would argue, in turn, that this attitude of mind or condition of the soul is essentially one of cultivated attention: attention both as the capacity to attend to certain aspects of the world with deliberate care and as a capacity to receive the world as it is given to the senses in acts of contemplation.

“Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality,” Pieper argued. This stillness is “the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real—a co-respondence, eternally established in nature—has not yet descended into words.” The person who, like the characters in “Harrison Bergeron,” lives in a state of perpetual and persistent distraction loses not only the capacity to think well, but also they lose touch with reality. By contrast, Pieper further describes leisure as “the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion—in the real.” This state can also be described as a state of deep attention. The structure of everyday life undermines our capacity to enter into such a state, much less to inhabit it as a way of being in the world. This is why it is vital that students are instructed in the art of attention and given ample opportunity to practice it.

In her essay, “The Power of Patience,” Roberts supplied an example of one of the ways she attempted to create opportunities for immersive attention. She described an exercise that required students to sit before a work of art for three full hours.

The paintings of Flemish artist Peter Paul Reubens (1577-1640) are popular today in part for Reubens’ attention to detail. Here: “A Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock” (1638). Courtesy National Gallery (UK).

Naturally, three hours will strike students as excessive, and some of you reading this may feel similarly. But the excess is the point. “What students learn in a visceral way in this assignment,” she explains, “is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.” And so, too, with almost any dimension of reality. Similar exercises will teach the foundational lesson of any curriculum of attention: it is one thing to look and another to see. Seeing is the reward of the virtue of attention, or, as Roberts puts it, of “patience as a strategy.” “The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students,” she adds. This delay, this slowing down is critical to the practice of the art of attention.

And for those seeking more examples, the Strother School of Radical Attention provides a host of resources for thinking about how training in the art of attention could be integrated into a course of study.

I trust it has been clear throughout, but the stakes are high. If the university aspires to nothing but cultivating the life of the mind, it must figure out how to train students in the art of attention. Should it aspire to more, to moral or even spiritual formation, the need for such training would be even more pronounced.

The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more visit cscmovement.org.