The Socrates Express

7. How to Pay Attention like Simone Weil

8:24 a.m. Wye Rail Station, United Kingdom, waiting to board the Southeastern Limited bound for Ashford. Total travel time: seven minutes. Total waiting time: nine minutes.

It is early, and the station is lovely. The simple wooden building, little more than a glorified shack, exudes an air of warmhearted community and quiet efficiency. A small bulletin board informs me the local book club is meeting next Thursday and it would be nice if I brought potato salad or maybe some scones. A nearby sign declares Wye an “area of outstanding natural beauty.” And it is. Endless meadows and rolling hills, emerald green.

I sit in the small waiting room and let the wonderful absurdity of that term sit with me. Waiting room. A room built for the sole purpose of engaging in the nonactivity of waiting. I rock on my heels. I glance at my watch. Eight more minutes. I survey the small library, really just a few shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks.

I glance at the small departures board. Seven more minutes. I fidget. I pace. I finger my ticket: Wye to Ashford, Return Journey. I prefer that to the American “round-trip.” A round-trip sounds bloated and pointless.

I check the departures board again. Six minutes. I sigh. What to do with a parcel of time like this? Too short to accomplish anything meaningful, yet too long to blink away. I know, six minutes is nothing. But it adds up. I read in the Daily Telegraph that the average Briton spends over the course of his or her lifetime six months standing in line.

Six months is not a speck. Six months is the bulk of a pregnancy. Six months is a short marriage, or a long fling. Six months is a good chunk of a life. And that’s only the time spent queuing. We also wait for a pot of water to boil, a doctor to see us, a website to download, a customer service representative to pick up already, a pot of coffee to brew, a toddler to fall asleep, a traffic jam to clear, the right word to materialize, our daughter who is never, ever this late getting home to walk through the front door, popcorn to pop, ice cubes to freeze, snow to melt.

Six minutes. If I had more time, I’d read. I’ve packed some appropriate literature for my short train ride. A collection of haikus and Seneca’s essay “On the Shortness of Life.” Some two thousand years later, Ferris Bueller, on his day off, echoed Seneca: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Speed breeds impatience. Our capacity for waiting diminishes in inverse proportion to the velocity of life. Why is the Internet connection so slow? Where is my pizza already? Impatience is a greediness for the future. Patience is a generous attitude toward time.

The dot in the distance grows steadily larger until at last the Southeastern locomotive edges into tiny Wye station, and I step aboard with coiled alacrity. Settling into my window seat, I am about to glance at my watch when I stop myself. Instead, I look out the window, and I wait.

The train accelerates, each passing second bringing me a smidgeon closer to Ashford, the final resting place of a philosopher who thought a lot about waiting and about time and who, in one of those sad ironies that seem to befall philosophers disproportionately, was granted so little of it herself.

Philosophy doesn’t coddle. It challenges. It makes demands. The best philosophers are the most demanding. Socrates demands we question assumptions, especially our own. Marcus Aurelius demands we honor our duties.

Simone Weil’s entreaty is simpler but no less difficult. She demands we pay attention. Not any sort of attention, either. Weil’s notion of attention is unlike any I’ve encountered.

I’m looking at a black-and-white photograph of Simone Weil. She’s in her early twenties, I guess. I first notice her jet-black hair, thick and unruly, then the glasses, almost comical in their chunkiness. She is all hair and glasses, I think.

Then I notice the eyes. Dark and steady, they simultaneously exude warmth and a fierce, preternatural wisdom. These are wounded eyes. Serious eyes. Thoreauvian eyes. Everyone remarked on them. One friend recalled “her piercing look through the thick glasses.” Another was struck by how “in her presence all ‘lies’ were out of the question… her denuding, tearing and torn gaze would grasp and render helpless the person she was looking at.”

She is dressed in a capacious, unflattering outfit, consistent with the complete disregard for fashion she displayed throughout her life. She wore shabby clothes, always black, and flat-heeled shoes. “A real ragamuffin,” recalled one friend. “A medieval hermit,” said another.

The philosopher of attention didn’t want any directed at her. She wanted to see but not be seen. Whether riding a train or working on a factory floor, her goal was anonymity—“merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are,” she said. Yet she always stood out. How could she not? Intellectual. Awkward. Jewish.

Weil was born in Paris in 1909 to a fiercely secular and highly intellectual family. From a young age, she found solace, and inspiration, in books. By age fourteen, she knew much of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées by heart. She read works in the original Sanskrit and Assyro-Babylonian. (“Such a ridiculously easy language!” she told a friend.) She could go for days at a time without food or sleep.

While she excelled at school, she never valued knowledge for its own sake. “The only serious aim of schoolwork is to train the attention,” she said. That single word—attention—would come to possess her. It was the thread that held her sprawling philosophy, and her life, together.

The ability to pay attention is, along with the ability to walk upright and open pickle jars, what makes us human. Every brilliant scientific discovery, every great work of art, every kind gesture, traces its source to a moment of pure, selfless attention.

Attention matters. More than anything else, it shapes our lives. “For the moment, what we attend to is reality,” said the American philosopher William James. Something only exists for us if we attend to it. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact. As many studies reveal, we do not see that to which we don’t pay attention.

The quality of our attention determines the quality of our lives. You are what you choose to pay attention to and, crucially, how you pay attention. Looking back at your life, which memories bubble to the surface? Maybe it’s something big, like your wedding day, or maybe something small, that unexpectedly kind exchange with the person standing behind you on the ridiculously long post office line. Chances are, though, it’s moments when you were most attentive. Our lives are no less and no more than the sum of our most rapt moments. “The highest ecstasy,” said Weil, “is the attention at its fullest.”

During these rare moments, we enter a state of mind—a state of being—that Weil calls “extreme attention” and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” When in a state of flow, you shed any semblance of self-consciousness, and experience an altered perception of time and a heightened sense of reality. Everything seems more real than real. Unlike so much in life, flow is “a condition so rewarding as to be sought out for its own sake,” says Csikszentmihalyi.

People immersed in flow are not self-absorbed, for there is no self to be absorbed. No musician, only music. No dancer, only dancing. Here is how an avid sailor describes being in flow. “One forgets oneself, one forgets everything, seeing only the play of the boat with the sea, the play of the sea around the boat, leaving aside everything not essential to that game.” You don’t need to sail the Atlantic or climb Everest to experience flow. You just need to pay attention.

Given the importance of attention, you’d think philosophers would be all over it. But they’ve paid scant attention to attention. Maybe they find the subject too obvious, or too opaque. Maybe they’re simply too distracted.

Over the centuries, a few philosophers have sat still long enough to weigh in. René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, saw attention as a kind of intellectual divining rod, a tool that enabled us to distinguish between dubious ideas and “clear and distinct” ones that lie beyond doubt. The philosopher who famously said “I think, therefore I am” also said, in so many words, I pay attention; therefore I am able to transcend doubt. Not as catchy, I admit, but probably more accurate.

As the turn of the twentieth century approached, the subject of attention was, ironically, in a fractured state of chaos. Some thinkers even concluded (as some still do) that attention does not exist. As the British philosopher Francis Bradley wrote, “There is no primary act of attention, there is no specific act of attention, there is no one kind of act of attention at all.”

Nonsense, said William James, wading into the chaos. “Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” James, predicting the hazards of multitasking, warned that attention demands not only focusing on some aspects of reality but ignoring others.

Our current conception of attention dates to 1958. That’s when a British psychologist named Donald Broadbent posited the “filter model” of attention (also known as the “bottleneck model”). The world floods our senses with data, like a fire hose. Our brain’s ability to process this data is limited, so it deploys attention as a means to prioritize all that information, to control the fire hose.

It’s a compelling theory, one that intuitively seems to make sense. Attention, we assume, is like a bank account we draw down, or a hard drive with limited capacity. We’ve all experienced that sensation of being overwhelmed by too much information. So much bombards us that nothing sticks. Several studies have found we routinely overestimate our ability to multitask.

Yet history is replete with those whose capacity for attention far exceeded the norm. Napoleon and Churchill, for instance, could juggle multiple tasks and conversations fluently. Our capacity for attention is not finite, concludes Alan Allport, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University. “No such upper bound has been identified, either generally or within specific processing domains.” As Rousseau reminds us, often what we consider natural, “the way things are,” is really the way things are here and now. A local truth masquerading as a universal one.

A sickly toddler, Simone Weil grew into a sickly young adult. At age thirteen, she began to suffer acute, debilitating headaches that would torment her throughout her life. At times the pain was so bad she’d wedge her head in a pile of pillows. Her birdlike appetite didn’t help. She would go days without eating, and may have suffered from anorexia.

The Weils were a family of germophobes. (A bacteriologist was a close family friend, which didn’t help.) Weil’s mother insisted her children wash their hands several times a day, open doors with their elbows, and never kiss anyone. Not surprisingly, Simone Weil grew into an adult who flinched at the thought of physical contact. She once signed a letter to a friend, “Affectionate and bacilli-free kisses.”

Brilliant as she was, Weil felt overshadowed by her wunderkind brother, André, who would go on to become one of Europe’s greatest mathematicians. Clearly, her parents had wished for a second genius son. They sometimes referred to Simone as “Simon” and “our son number two.”

From a young age, Weil experienced the pain of others as if it were her own. At age six, as World War I raged, she announced she was forsaking sugar because “the poor soldiers at the front didn’t have any.” Later, as a young adult, she refused to heat her apartment, out of sympathy for the workers who couldn’t afford heating fuel. She insisted on sleeping on hard floors. For a while, she worked in a vineyard harvesting grapes and in a factory, doing the most tedious assembly line work. “The affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul,” she wrote.

Weil broke into tears upon hearing news of a famine in China. This deeply impressed fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. “I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world,” she recalled. The two Simones, giants of twentieth-century French philosophy, and women in what was, and to an extent still is, very much a boys’ club, met in 1928 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. They did not get along.

Weil’s radical empathy helps explain her radical views on attention. She didn’t see it as a mechanism, or a technique. For her, attention was a moral virtue, no different from, say, courage or justice, and demanding the same selfless motivation. Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do.

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,” writes Weil. Only when we give someone our attention, fully and with no expectation of reward, are we engaged in this “rarest and purest form of generosity.” This is why the attention denied by a parent or lover stings the most. We recognize the withdrawal of attention for what it is: a withdrawal of love.

In the end, our attention is all we have to give. The rest—money, praise, advice—are poor substitutes. So, too, is time. Giving someone your time but not your attention is the cruelest fraud of all. Children know this instinctively. They can smell bogus attention a mile away.

Pure attention is not easy, Weil concedes: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Our first impulse when confronted with suffering is to turn away. We make excuses. We’re busy. I’ve been known to cross the street to avoid earnest solicitors raising money for a no-doubt worthy cause. When I spot one, clipboard in hand, smile lighting her face, I shrink, ashamed not by my cheapness but, rather, my attentional impotence, my inability to look suffering in the eye.

It doesn’t take much, says Weil. A simple five-word question can soften a heart, and change a life: “What are you going through?” These words are so powerful, says Weil, because they recognize the sufferer, “not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”

There’s a busy intersection near my home in Silver Spring, Maryland, where on most days, but especially on Sundays, an elderly African American man named Chip stands on the traffic island. He rests his thin frame on a walking stick, Styrofoam cup in one hand, cardboard sign in the other. It says simply, “Chip.” No story. No pitch. Just his name.

I see Chip now, but for a long time I didn’t. Not until my daughter, ten years old at the time, pointed him out. Now whenever we pass that intersection, she chirps, “There’s Chip!” and insists I give him a dollar or two.

True attention entails not merely noticing the Other but acknowledging him, honoring him. Nowhere is this more essential than in medicine. An overworked ER doctor can notice when a patient is in pain, treat the pain and its underlying cause, yet never give the patient his or her attention. The patient, consciously or not, feels cheated.

My mother is not happy with her cardiologist. Technically, he is proficient. He went to all the right schools. Yet he lacks the capacity for attention. “I get the feeling I could drop dead in front of him and he wouldn’t care,” she told me one day. She is looking for a new cardiologist. A more attentive one.

I am at London’s St. Pancras Station. It is glorious. All glass and light and promise. The station, like many, was built with two distinct purposes in mind: functional and aesthetic. “Mi-usine, mi-palais.” Half factory, half palace. After the success of London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, cities began building the main hall of railway stations out of glass and steel, while constructing the fronts of cut stone.

The result was a Janusian edifice, an architectural paradox bound to make you think. No wonder Wittgenstein said the only place where one can tackle philosophical problems is the railway station. The train station is philosophy made manifest in stone and steel. The station’s dual allegiances, to art and commerce, remind us that it’s sometimes necessary to hold two paradoxical thoughts simultaneously. The station is a factory; the station is a palace. Both statements are true. Neither negates the other.

My favorite station is Antwerp Central. If train stations are cathedrals, Antwerp is St. Peter’s. With its soaring ceilings and polished marble, the station elicits the same sublimity I’ve experienced in other great buildings, that sensation of being diminished and enlarged at the same time. A train station is where I am at my most attentive.

I love all train stations, even the ugly ones. They don’t get much uglier than New York’s Penn Station, a rat-infested cavern of dingy, low-ceilinged halls. But as a student of human quirks I can’t help but marvel at the strange boarding custom. Station officials don’t announce a departing train’s platform number until just a few minutes ahead of time. Until then, passengers, clutching boarding passes and lattes, wait anxiously. Some try to guess the gate and, like a roulette player betting it all on 32 Red, stake their claim. Others, in a display of learned helplessness, stare at the floor, forlorn.

Rail stations, even bad ones, pulse with life in a way that airports, even good ones, do not. They are training grounds for attention. This has been true from the beginning. One painting, from 1862, captures the vivacity of the rail station. Called simply The Railway Station, by William Frith, it depicts a frenzied scene, or scenes, unfolding on the platform. Porters, young ruddy-skinned men, haul huge suitcases onto trains. A passenger adjusts the collar on one of his two dogs. A wedding party, complete with bridesmaids, prepares to board. Two Scotland Yard detectives arrest a criminal. A bearded man in a fur coat, a Venetian nobleman, haggles over his cab fare.

Viewing the painting, my attention fragments. Splinters. That is the nature of attention, right? It is like a feral cat, a wild savanna lioness that must be “captured,” not by us but by outside agents, like Scotland Yard detectives cuffing a fugitive. Maybe, maybe not.

Today’s St. Pancras Station features no Venetian noblemen or Victorian bridesmaids. Yet currents of energy still pulse through its departures hall and through the ticket counters and cafés. There is nothing stationary about a train station. Everyone is in motion.

Everyone but me. I have planted myself at a little coffee shop. I order an overpriced espresso and find a seat that overlooks the action.

I reach into my bag, a waxed canvas and leather beauty, and retrieve a collection of Weil’s writing. I turn to her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” It’s a curious title. Weil was profoundly, if unconventionally, spiritual, and she frames many of her ideas in religious terms. Her work resonated with Pope Paul VI. But you needn’t be a pope or religious at all to appreciate Weil’s wisdom. No less an unbeliever than Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time.” He spent an hour meditating in her Paris apartment before boarding the plane for Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for literature.

The essay is short, only eight pages, but it takes me a long time to read it. I start and stop, then start again. Each reading produces a different shade of meaning, like a crystal that appears as different colors, depending on how the light strikes it. The essay is arresting, demanding. Weil begins by telling me I know nothing. Attention is not what I think it is.

Attention is not concentration. Concentration can be coerced—listen up, class!—while attention cannot. Observe what happens to your body when you concentrate. Your jaw tightens, your eyes narrow, your brow furrows. Weil found this sort of muscular effort ridiculous.

Concentration constricts. Attention expands. Concentration tires. Attention rejuvenates. Concentration is focused thinking. Attention is thinking suspended. “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” Weil writes. If that statement isn’t perplexing enough, Weil goes further, declaring that “all errors arise from a lack of passivity.”

Really? Isn’t it an excess of passivity that bedevils? That is certainly what our culture teaches. We assume the active person is paying attention and the passive one is somehow clueless.

No, says Simone Weil. Attention is not something we do so much as consent to. Less weight lifting, more yoga. “Negative effort,” she called it. Genuine attention, she believed, is a kind of waiting. For Weil, the two are virtually the same. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” The opposite of attention is not distraction but impatience.

Don’t seek solutions. Wait for them. The more you scan your brain for the “right” word, the more it eludes you. Wait for it, though, and it will come. Eventually.

Speed is the enemy of attention. Of all the indecencies she witnessed on the factory floor, the greatest, Weil thought, was the violation of the workers’ attention. The conveyor belt moved at a velocity “incompatible with any other kind of attention since it drains the soul of all save a preoccupation with speed.”

We pay attention only to what we consider worthy of our attention. On one level, this mental triage is necessary, lest our lives become, in the words of William James, “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” But it comes at a cost. By triaging too quickly, too impulsively, we risk overlooking precious gems.

Just as we often rush to judgment, so, too, do we rush to attention. We latch on to an object or idea too quickly, and pay a price: a flash of beauty, or an act of kindness, not seen. That’s why, says Weil, it’s important to maintain a state of unknowing, of unthinking, for as long as possible. This requires patience, something scarce during Weil’s time and even more so today.

Weil paid great attention to matters most of us consider trivial. Handwriting, for instance. In high school, relays her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, Weil decided to reform her “sloppy, almost careless, scrawled handwriting.” She worked at it tirelessly, attentively, despite headaches and frequently swollen and painful hands. Her scrawl grew “progressively less rigid and more supple and, finally, attained the pure, beautiful script of her last years.”

Patience is a virtue. It is also good for you, as the latest research shows. Patient people are happier and healthier than impatient ones, studies find. Patient people are more likely to act rationally. They have better coping skills.

Patience, though, doesn’t strike us as a lot of fun. The English “patience” comes from the Latin patiens, for suffering, endurance, forbearance. The Hebrew savlanut is a bit cheerier. It means both patience and tolerance. Tolerance for what? For suffering, yes, but also tolerance for the rejected parts of our selves. People impatient with others are rarely patient with themselves.

I am not a naturally patient person. Mine is a mercenary mind. It always wants something, ideally something big: the Big Idea, the Big Break, the Big Breakfast. Like a stealthy alcoholic whom no one suspects, I am able to conceal my impatience from others. Usually. Sometimes people see through me. Like the Dutch messiah I met in Jerusalem.

I was working on a story for NPR about “Jerusalem Syndrome.” That’s a malady that afflicts some visitors to the Holy Land. They arrive sane enough but soon are convinced they are Elijah or Lazarus or some other biblical figure. It’s more common than you’d think.

I had heard of a hostel in Jerusalem’s Old City that for some reason attracted people suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome, so that’s where I headed and, sure enough, where I met the Dutch messiah. A balding, middle-aged man, unremarkable in appearance, he explained, as if relaying that day’s weather forecast, that the messiah will be coming soon. “And he is a Dutch man, like me,” he said.

That was it. I had it. That was the tape cut I knew I was going to use. I kept listening and recording but my mind had checked out; it had bagged its prey. The Dutch messiah, sensing my inattention, suddenly stopped talking and stared at me. “You,” he said, slowly, accusingly, “are an impatient man.”

His words stopped me cold. He was right. I had seen him not as a fellow human being, or potential messiah, but as a tape cut. Ego food. A piece in a story that would, I hope, win me accolades. I had what I needed from him and, as far as I was concerned, our transaction was over. Not for him, though. I’m fairly certain he didn’t view it as a transaction at all. From his perspective, we were engaged in a conversation, a mutual exchange of attention, and I was being stingy.

All disputes stem not from a misunderstanding per se, but a “category error.” It’s not that the two sides see the same problem differently. They see two different problems. Where one person sees an inefficient loading technique that fails to maximize the cleansing power of the high-performance dishwasher, another person sees a swipe at his core competency and, by extension, his masculinity. This is how wars and hissy fits begin.

The Dutch messiah’s words stung because until then I had prided myself on my attentiveness. Eyes trained, ears cocked, I was on the lookout for the compelling character, the emotive tape cut, or the resonant bit of ambient sound that would add auditory texture to my story. I was concentrating but not paying attention. I knew what I was looking for before I found it. I was caught up in my own desire. That’s always dangerous.

Weil warned against the sort of mercenary impatience I displayed in Jerusalem, and of another kind, too. An intellectual impatience, born from insecurity, that grasps at ideas, even bad ones, the way a drowning man will grasp even a sword. All our mistakes, says Weil, “are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.”

We see this dynamic at work in people eager to hook the Big Idea, one they hope will transform them from mere thinker to Thought Leader. More interested in packaging ideas than pondering them, they release their Big Idea into the world before it has ripened.

These aspiring Thought Leaders don’t want to do the hard work attention demands. Attention is hard not the way judo or archery is hard. It’s hard the way meditation, or parenting, is hard. It’s hard the way waiting for a train is hard. Attention is not a skill we acquire, like knitting or fencing. It is a state of mind, an orientation. We don’t so much learn attention as turn toward it. This pivot only happens when we pause, like Socrates, and get out of our own head. “Decreation,” Weil calls it.

I prefer Iris Murdoch’s term: “unselfing.” The British novelist and philosopher describes one such moment of unselfing. She was looking out her window, feeling anxious and resentful due to a perceived slight earlier in the day, when she spotted a hovering kestrel. “In a moment everything is altered,” she says. “The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”

All inattention is a form of selfishness. We’ve decided that whatever is happening in our heads is more interesting, more important, than what is happening in the rest of the universe. That’s why narcissists are so inattentive. Their attention is bottled up, stagnant. Attention is our lifeblood. It needs to circulate. To hoard attention is to kill it.

Sometimes endings reveal more than beginnings. I suspect this was the case with Simone Weil. The final months of her life were like a movie fast-forwarded. There was the prodigious, heroic output, the kindness shown and received, the collapse, and the inevitable, ambiguous end.

All of this played out in England, during the height of World War II. I grow obsessed with Weil’s London days, with the city she loved, the people she met, and with the giant question mark that hangs over her death.

Simone Weil’s life was measured not in coffee spoons but train tickets. In June 1940, she and her parents boarded the last train out of Paris, one step ahead of Hitler’s troops. For a while she taught philosophy to railroad workers. She spent her most productive years in London, where she’d read and think while riding the Tube.

That is where I am now, too, the Central Line, to be precise, the last leg of my journey that began at St. Pancras. In my pocket is the ingenious Tube map. A triumph of simplicity, it dates to 1931. That’s when Harry Beck, a technical draftsman working for the Underground’s signals office, paid attention. Beck knew the old map was flawed. It superimposed the subway lines over a city road map, which confused people, and showed the station distances to scale, which further confused people. No one cared how far apart the stations were or which streets lay above their heads. They wanted to know how to get from one station to another, and where to change lines. Yet they found themselves ensnared in the sort of cognitive trap that Sherlock Holmes warned about: “What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.”

Beck, working in his spare time, created a new map, one modeled on an electrical schematic. Beck’s map made reality look a bit neater and simpler than it is, with stations equidistant, and lines meeting at neat 45- or 90-degree angles. The Beck map enthralled the public, and remains essentially unchanged today. Beck succeeded because he paid attention. He thought like a passenger and not just like an engineer.

At each stop, the subway car exhales some passengers, inhales others. In. Out. In. Out. “Please Mind the Gap,” chimes the recorded announcement in a chipper English accent. Riding the Tube is a wonderful way to practice paying attention. There’s an endless carousel of people to watch: wide-eyed tourists, narrow-eyed bankers, eyeless panhandlers. The air is ripe with linguistic fragments: a French gerund, an Italian participle, an American exclamation. Much competes for your attention, we’d say, but that’s not right. It is not a competition so much as a wild collaboration.

I steer my attention, as if guiding a spotlight, and shine it on the woman sitting directly across from me. She is wearing patterned floral pants and a look of fierce concentration as she tackles a crossword puzzle in the tabloid floating on her lap. She nods her head rhythmically while waving her pen like a conductor’s baton, or a french fry. She is focused, but is she paying attention? No, Simone Weil would say, she is not.

When the train reaches my stop, Holland Park, I mind the gap, and head for the exit. I am not so much walking as surfing, swept along by the crowd. I try to pay attention but my velocity precludes that. Speed is the enemy of attention. Stepping out of the station, I blink away the sudden sunlight and struggle to regain my bearings.

Transitioning from subterranean to terrestrial life is always tricky. There’s that moment of disorientation, of not knowing where you are and, oddly, who you are, either: respectable terrestrial being or sketchy denizen of the underworld? Strangers look at you, or so you imagine, sizing you up, unsure whether you belong here, in the light.

Eager to confirm my surface credentials, I start walking. Where exactly I don’t know, but forward momentum is essential. The neighborhood, not far from Notting Hill, is London cozy. I pass cafés where you can spend an entire day nursing a single coffee and bookshops lovingly curated and stubbornly defying the laws of economics by their continued existence. A Pakistani man is selling flowers.

I turn the corner onto Portland Road and walk a few yards until I reach No. 31. A fresh coat of white paint adorns the front door. Otherwise, it is indistinguishable from the other town houses on the block. No sign. No engraved placard. Simone Weil’s admirers apparently don’t extend to London’s guardians of historical sites. I can’t say I’m surprised. The “philosopher of margins and paradoxes,” as one biographer called her, never expected, nor wanted, fame.

Weil lived on the second floor, which she rented from one Mrs. Francis, a widowed schoolteacher with two small children. Weil took a liking to the boys, helping the younger one, John, with his homework. He’d curl up by the front door, waiting for “Miss Simone.”

Weil loved her little room, with its view of tree branches during the day and the stars at night. She loved London, too, and she loved the British, full of humor and kindness. “Especially kindness,” she wrote in a letter to her parents, who had sought refuge in New York. “People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.… I tenderly love this city with its wounds.” A wounded soul in a wounded city, I think, as I watch a young couple ring the door next to No. 31, a bottle of wine in hand.

Weil’s day job was with the Free French movement, a ragtag group of French exiles working to liberate their nation from Nazi occupation. Weil earned a reputation as a tireless worker—and serial dreamer. “She was boiling with ideas,” recalls her friend Simone Pétrement. Her quixotic schemes included parachuting into occupied France and leading a frontline nursing squad (“women of tenderness and cold resolution”). She labored over the details of her plan, and even bought a parachutist helmet and an aviation manual. Not everyone shared her enthusiasm. “But she is mad!” Charles de Gaulle exclaimed when he read of one of her schemes, none of which came to pass.

When she wasn’t dreaming, she was writing, and writing. In just four months she cranked out eight hundred manuscript pages, plus countless letters. She rarely slept more than three hours a night, often working until dawn. The pace took a toll on her already frail health. She ate less, coughed more. Her headaches grew worse. She worried she was going insane.

On April 15, 1943, she failed to show up for work. Worried, a friend hurried to No. 31 Portland Road. He found Weil on the floor, unconscious. She was rushed to Middlesex Hospital, where doctors determined she was suffering from tuberculosis.

She was extremely weak, barely able to lift a spoon, but somehow continued to read and write. The doctors insisted she slow down. She ignored them. “The steadiness of her writing, even in her last letters, is astonishing and presupposes an extraordinary act of will,” says Pétrement.

Simone Weil didn’t like the dreary urban view from her hospital window. It saddened her. The doctors agreed country air would help, and in August 1943 she was transferred to a sanatorium in the bucolic town of Ashford. She supervised the packing of her most precious books: Plato, Saint John of the Cross, the Bhagavad Gita.

At the sanatorium, she remained lucid, her serious eyes as bright and probing as ever. Her physical health deteriorated, though, no doubt exacerbated by her refusal to eat anything substantial. She never told her parents about her illness, an act of either duplicity or compassion, I’m not sure. She ended her last letter to them with a cheery “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love.” In the evening of August 24, shortly after receiving a visiting colleague, she slipped into a coma. Five hours later Simone Weil was dead. She was thirty-four years old.

The cause of death, concluded the attending physician, was “cardiac failure due to degeneration through starvation.” That report caught the notice of a few local papers. “French Professor Starves Herself to Death,” said one headline. “Death from Starvation” another. The medical verdict has been disputed ever since. Some say Weil took her own life; others insist she did not.

Seven people attended her funeral, mostly friends and colleagues from the Free French movement. A priest, due to officiate, never showed up. He missed his train, a lapse of attention that Simone Weil, bighearted as she was, surely would have forgiven.

The seven-minute train ride from Wye to Ashford is over in a flash. I couldn’t tell you what I saw or heard or thought. My attention needs more than seven minutes to come online. Before I know it we’re pulling into Ashford. I exit the station and, after walking a few blocks, join the High Street. It’s a pleasant pedestrian walkway lined with cafés and secondhand shops.

Walking farther, savoring the sun’s rare appearance, I notice a man paying close attention to something on the pavement. As I inch closer, I see that he has a brush in one hand and is grooming a dog. How cute, I think.

I look more closely, more attentively, and see that it is not a real dog. It is a sand dog. A dog made of sand. So expertly has he fashioned the curve of its tail, the folds of flesh above its snout, the wrinkles etching its neck, that I had mistaken it for a sentient canine.

“How long did that take you?” I ask.

What a silly question, I later realize. Attention is not measured in minutes or hours. (Better fifteen minutes of pure attention, said Weil, than eight hours of lazy, diluted attention.) I could have asked the man other, more salient questions. How did he shut out the distractions around him and focus on the sand dog? How did he persevere when the wind smudged a paw, or the shifting sands collapsed an ear? Yet I did not ask these questions. It’s easier to probe the quantity of attention than the quality. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what matters most.

I walk along Canterbury Road, which, despite the fabled name, is a busy thoroughfare with trucks whizzing by. I come to an intersection and spot a sign: “Simone Weil Boulevard.” The description on an adjacent placard is insultingly brief, describing her as a “French authoress and philosopher who died in Grosvenor Sanatorium.”

I climb a small hill, then enter Bybrook Cemetery. A woman and her elderly mother arrive. They’ve brought flowers and a wind chime, which they hang from a nearby tree.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” says the daughter. I’m not sure if she’s referring to the musical chime or the flowers or the azure sky or perhaps the way one can find joy in the most unexpected of places, even a cemetery, if one pays close enough attention. No matter. It is the quality of our attention, not its object, that counts.

A trim man carrying more flowers arrives. Her father, I presume. They all sit on the ground in front of a grave marker and enjoy an impromptu picnic.

There’s a story here, and I know it is not a happy one. How unhappy I don’t learn until later when, after they’d left, I approach the grave site. Only then do I notice how small it is and how the tombstone is fashioned in the shape of a teddy bear. Many physical objects trigger strong emotions, but nothing, absolutely nothing, tears a heart asunder more quickly and thoroughly than a tombstone shaped like a teddy bear.

I find Simone Weil without looking for her. Strolling through the cemetery grounds, I look up and there she is.

The plot is well maintained, though I notice a few flowers are dying and the wind has toppled a small plastic flowerpot. Hers is a simple tombstone, indistinguishable from the others except the dates are in French. 3 Février 1909, 24 Août 1943.

Resting on the ground is a framed photograph of Weil. It’s the same one I had seen before. The same unruly hair and chunky glasses and knowing eyes. And something else, something I had missed before: a slight arcing of the lips into the suggestion of a smile. What explains this proto-smile? I wonder. Perhaps the photographer had cracked a joke, or perhaps Weil had just received word of her acceptance to the prestigious École Normale.

There’s another possible explanation. Perhaps the photographer had captured Simone Weil in a moment of extreme attention, of flow, and her reaction, the natural and indeed only reaction to such a state, was to forget for a moment the torturous headaches and the genius brother and the coming war, and smile.

We lose objects suddenly but experience the loss gradually. It takes time to accept that your car keys or wallet or heart is not merely misplaced but has crossed that invisible yet no less precipitous line that separates objects we possess from objects we once possessed. Nonexistence terrifies us. It takes time to register.

“Loss” is a short but menacing word. The Napoleon of nouns. Unless preceded by “weight,” it is almost always negative. That’s why we don’t just experience a loss. We suffer a loss. Someone struggling, in work or love, is said to be “lost.” When retracing the arc of a nation, or a life, historians demarcate a specific point in time beyond which “all was lost.”

Losses come in different sizes, though not in small. They start at medium and ascend from there. They come in different flavors, too. Some losses are painful, some devastating, some merely inconvenient. A few are ironic. Losing a notebook while writing a chapter about paying attention, for instance.

I loved that notebook. I still recall when I first laid eyes on it. It was at a chic little stationery store in Baltimore on a warm spring day. I was drawn to its clean aesthetics and muted colors, its robust cover, so solid and reassuring, the soft-to-the-touch pages complemented with not one but three—three!—of those little ribbons that mark your place.

My reaction to losing the notebook is disproportionate. I know this intellectually, but to know something intellectually only is not to know it at all. I take a deep breath and examine my reaction. Where is it coming from? I’ve lost things before and have not reacted this way. In college, I once lost an entire week and hardly missed a beat. Why has this one missing notebook tipped me into a tailspin?

Because it was not just a notebook. Thoughts committed to paper represent a record of our mind at its most attentive. These rapt moments are fragile things, sand dogs on High Street, and, once lost, nearly impossible to recover. It’s easier to retrieve a lost diamond than a lost thought. Which is why I must—must!—find my notebook and restore the past.

A surefire way to increase your fondness for something, anything, is to lose it. As my search turns up dry, the missing notebook grows not only in aesthetic excellence but editorial brilliance as well. By day two of my search, I’m convinced the thoughts contained within its covers, recorded during my trip to England, are unequaled in astuteness and originality. By day four, I declare the notebook the Most Precious Notebook in the World. Ever. More precious than Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester or Hemingway’s cahiers.

I look in the obvious places (cabinets, bookshelves) and the less obvious ones, too (refrigerator, litter box). Nothing. I double and triple my efforts. I retrace my steps. I look in the same desk drawer, three, four, five times.

My behavior alarms the dog and freaks out the cat, who has, wisely, gone to ground. My daughter declares the entire episode “literally the most annoying thing in the world.”

It is not only the notebook’s absence that smarts but the act of losing it, and what that lapse of attention says about me. Nothing good, I’ve decided. (There’s a word for people who chronically lose things: losers. The most damning of labels.) The memoirist Mary Karr lost a notebook recently but had the good editorial sense to do so on a boat captained by a sultry Greek named Dionisos and his “freewheeling, tequila-soaked heart.” I lost mine in the kitchen while putting away boxes of Ellio’s frozen pizza and Honey Nut Cheerios. No tequila. No Dionisos. Only regret and self-loathing.

At a loss (that word again), I turn to Simone. Desperate times, I tell myself, opening one of her books. She looks at my predicament and offers a simple diagnosis: I don’t really want to find my notebook. I want to possess it. I am consumed with desire, and desire is incompatible with attention. To desire something is to want something from it, and that clouds our vision.

We think the problem rests with the object of our desire when in reality it is the subject—the “I”—that is the problem. It might appear that by craving something you are paying attention to it, but this is an illusion. You are engrossed in your desire for the object, not the object itself. A heroin addict doesn’t crave heroin. He craves the experience of having heroin, and the concomitant relief of not not having heroin. Freedom from mental disturbance, ataraxia, is what he wants.

I return to Simone. “What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem? Attention is something quite different.”

I loosen my muscles and turn the page.

“The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search.”

This confounds me. Annoys me, too. Of course I want to carry out a search, Simone! How else am I going to find my notebook but by searching for it?

I take a deep breath and read on. It’s important, Weil continues, “to draw back before the object we are pursuing. Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.”

I draw back, retreating to the basement and the large-screen TV that beckons like a truckload of opium. Not good. I’ve drawn back too far. I have succumbed to resignation. Despair in disguise.

My problem, says Weil, is that I have yoked action to results. Life doesn’t work that way, nor does attention. An attentive life is a risky one. Results are not guaranteed. We don’t know where our attention will lead, if anywhere. Pure attention, the kind Weil advocated, is untainted by external motives such as impressing your friends or advancing your career. The person who applies his full attention to something—anything—makes progress “even if his effort produces no visible fruit,” says Weil.

She’s right, I know, but we live in a world that celebrates visible fruit. The more visible and the fruitier the better. Is it possible to live like Simone Weil, invested in the moment yet indifferent about future rewards? Can I raise my daughter, lovingly and attentively, and not care whether she pursues a career as a neurosurgeon or as a barista? Can I enter a writing contest and not care if I win? Can I let my notebook go?

I pause the insanity and gain a speck of perspective. I lost a notebook. Big deal. Hemingway lost an entire collection of short stories. Or, to be precise, Hemingway’s wife, Hadley Richardson, lost an entire collection of Hemingway’s short stories. It was 1922 and she was en route from Paris to Switzerland to meet her husband. She had just boarded the train at Gare de Lyon station, but she had a few minutes before it departed so she decided to buy a bottle of mineral water. When she returned to the train, the suitcase—and Hemingway’s manuscript—were gone.

Hemingway is known for his minimalism, but this was too much even for him. He fell into a funk. Yet, in the end, Ernest persevered, and became Hemingway.

A few years earlier, a young British officer named T. E. Lawrence was changing trains in Reading, England, when he lost the manuscript of his memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Handwritten, it was his only copy.

Lawrence had survived the Arab revolt of 1916 and the battle of Aqaba, traveled by camel across the Sinai Desert, yet the lost manuscript nearly did him in. Eventually, he rallied, holing up in an unheated Westminster loft and rewriting the book from memory.

I read these tales of lost manuscripts and recall Simone Weil’s words. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” She’s right. I must wait.

If this book were a Steven Spielberg movie, this would be the moment when I miraculously find my lost notebook and realize it was right under my nose the whole time. Sadly, this book is not a Spielberg movie. Its fealty lies with the truth, not the box office, and the truth is I never did find my notebook. I will never know what wisdom it may or may not have contained. So I let it be. I let it go.

Is this progress? Perhaps, but that’s not a word Simone Weil used often. There is no progress to make, no prizes to win. There is only waiting.

And so I wait, willingly and with more patience than I imagined possible, for waiting is its own reward.