Attention!
Also: A review of Charles Freeman’s "Reopening of the Western Mind," Henry Green's talent, Sebastian Barry's accomplishment, and more.
It’s true, as Michael Ledger-Lomas writes in The Spectator in review of a new book on the problem of attention in American literature, that we have been worried about losing our attention since at least Thoreau:
Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on the quiet borders of Walden Pond. But he found distraction lurking even there: the fish in its depths were disturbed by the rumble of passing trains.
Because a physical escape from modernity was impossible, it was vital to rise above its harmful buzz. Alongside Thoreau, Smith introduces us to a host of his contemporaries, both famous (Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass and Emily Dickinson) and obscure, who were united by a fear of losing their minds. In crisp but plangent meditations on brief passages from their writings, he shows how they tried to still the clamour of the world by attending to it in calmer and more disciplined ways.
But, of course, the fear that we are losing our ability to concentrate goes back even further than when early “Americans once fretted about waning powers of concentration mainly because they yearned to ‘attend upon the Lord without distraction’.” As Augustine puts it in his Confessions:
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