English / Latin · attendere
attention
To stretch toward. A narrowing that feels like the whole.
Latin
attendere
ad + tendere · to stretch toward
Latin attendere: to stretch toward, to heed. Simone Weil kept the stretch: not a spotlight we own, but a waiting in which what is before us can arrive. Cognitive science keeps the cost: salience, priming, inattentional blindness.1
Waiting
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.2
Simone Weil, to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942. In Waiting for God she called school studies a training in waiting: thought emptied enough to receive what is actually before you.3
Cost
A swell becoming direction because someone remained. A letter practice around one person. A count that misses the gorilla. Two voices, one followed. A cue that orients without the eyes. Weil’s generosity. Mau’s field of signals. Filter, attenuation, load. Dorsal and ventral networks: correlates, not the looking.
What the gloss loses
Attention as ‘trying harder,’ or as a wellness product, misses both the science and the remaining.
Misuse
Moralizing the miss. Collapsing Polynesian wayfinding into a metaphor for mindfulness.
What did you stretch toward, and for how long?
Notes
- Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. attendo.
- Simone Weil, “Letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951).
- Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951).
