Attention & Desire | Isabelle Andrews '20

In our meeting on "Calling and Longing," we read David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" and Chris Yates' "The Loss of Longing in the Age of Curated Reality. Two themes stood out to me: attention and desire, and the power of redirecting both towards God.

"This is Water" discusses the power of intentional "attention." David Foster Wallace says we need to cultivate this intentionality as a practice. It is "learning to exercise some control over how and what you think...Being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience" (Wallace 3). Wallace describes this as one of the hardest things to do, but it is the only way to "freedom." He says "freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom" (8). Chris framed this in our discussion as "not freedom from, but freedom for something." In Wallace's description, by exercising limitation, we actually find limitless life. In difficult daily discipline, we find an abundance: relationship, joy, surprise. This inverse logic is the paradox of Christianity. I truly can't get over this! It confounds and delights me. For some reason, it has felt fresh to me this semester.

Foster proposes us to direct our attention towards others in the midst of the banal everyday. To do so, we need to practice intervening in our default "self-talk" that tells us we're the center of the universe. Recently, I've tried to become more aware of the "constant monologue inside [my] own head" (Wallace 2). When I'm walking down the street, I now notice what I'm thinking about: is it how I'm late? or I'm tired? Or I'm stressed? Or I feel confident? Or I have a great thing I can't wait to tell someone? How am I paying attention to myself as my "default setting" (Wallace)? How can I redirect my attention outward, expand my scope of vision to other people, and care for them? How can I practice this daily discipline so I can "sacrifice for them, in myriad petty little unsexy ways" (Wallace 8). I love that Wallace encourages us to build habits in the quotidian and every-day. It reminds me of Annie Dillard: "how we spend our days, is in fact, how we spend our lives" (Dillard). This theme of daily discipline builds on other texts I've encountered this semester on "the Good Life." In "Nicomachean Ethics," Aristotle described the construction of good character as a practice of habits. Ben Franklin used to account for his virtues in a daily book: critically and consistently checking himself. Wallace's commencement address is so powerful because it meets us here and now. It focuses on how we can practice in the grocery line or in traffic. Wallace challenges us to pursue something incredibly difficult but immensely rewarding.

I find this theme of "attention" colliding with the theme of "desire." Yates calls "desire" a "possessive agenda of self-creation" (Yates). It consumes and expands, and it sees the self as author and end-game (Yates). In a TED Talk by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he describes how desiring "attention" inhibits him. He reports how he has experienced two powerful feelings: the feeling of getting attention, and the feeling of paying attention. When he is acting, he is "paying attention": an intense focus on something outside himself. He says "that feeling, that is what I love. That is creativity." This creativity sounds a lot like Wallace's "freedom," which we can only achieve by directing our attention outward, away from ourselves. Gordon-Levitt warns that, "our creativity is becoming more and more of a means to an end. And that end is to get attention.... In my experience, the more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am. The more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am" (Gordon-Levitt). There's that Christian reverse-logic again. It reminds me of the motto from my high school: "What we keep we lose; only what we give remains our own." Gordon- Levitt demonstrates Yates' point that desire (in this case for attention) consumes infinitely, but will never make us happy. Yates proposes that instead, we purposefully live on the boundary of "longing and satisfaction" (Yates 49). He, like Wallace, demonstrates that this "practice of longing" is difficult and illogical by worldly standards. We have to change our default setting of paying attention to ourselves and desiring "counterfeits" of longing. Yet, through this mindful practice, we can direct ourselves to long for and pay attention to God.