attention
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawin... See more
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary rendi-tions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the 6
David Foster Wallace • Deciderization 2007—a Special Report
David Foster Wallace
Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.
Robert Zaretsky • Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
DFW ‘this is water’
Understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.