The Rarity of Attention

Abstract

Attention to a poem prepares us to attend to another person. The sufferer, who shares with the gesture of flowers an intense, fleeting brevity, demands an attention, as Simone Weil claims, that is “a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” If in the miracle rarity is exemplary, and if attention is a miracle, then attention is itself an exemplary rarity. In its tenuousness, its fragility and susceptibility to lapse or interruption, attention has a rarity that makes it receptive to the gesture of small flowers and of poems.