Summary
Notes
Weil said that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”. To attend to something properly is to resacralize it.#quote attention The poet David Whyte said that “the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone”. Wittgenstein said that “you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language.” Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses how learning the language of birders helped her distinguish better between different birds. One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the development of taste. This is this sort of chocolate, and I like that more because xyz, this sort of music. There is a delight in finally discovering the exact right label for one’s felt experience. Language facilitates higher levels of attention. The sociologist Rosa Hartman calls a similar mode of relating ==resonance. Instead of viewing oneself as a closed off, independent system bent on controlling the other, one leaves oneself open to being affected by the world, responsive to its call, and thereby allows oneself to transform and be transformed by it.== How many have not perished, but are reduced in some way, smaller versions of the beings they might have been? A polymathic economist who I consider a mentor tells me he is especially intrigued when he meets someone who is clearly bright and sensitive but inarticulate, and I think of my friends who have downregulated their life force in an effort to be legible instead of remaining moths. How many beautiful and strange possible worlds are we on track still yet to lose?