Will and attention
So much attention is being paid to attention these days — how it’s being degraded and destroyed, how we need to reclaim it and retrain it, how we ought to pay attention to what really matters. But Weil’s notion of attention was very different from our typical definitions of the word. Attention, for Weil, was not a willful hardening of focus but a softening of gaze — not a closing in but an opening up. O’Gieblyn calls it a form of “receptivity.”