'The Great Forgotten Virtue: Attention'

“It is not so much that we cannot sit still long enough to read–we can sit still with our phones, after all–but can we sit still to listen to one voice rather than ten thousand?”

The author, Tara Ann Thieke, asks a good question and the likely answer is not flattering. She echoes Pascal’s well-known notion that most problems originate in our inability to sit alone, quietly, in a room. By “one voice” she means a book (that a book may contain multiple voices is irrelevant to her point). I’ve never owned a smartphone so part of her question in my case is moot. Sitting down to read, however, is as routine and necessary for me as sitting down to dinner. Much online banter, as I have experienced it, is reactive if not combative. I read something, like or dislike it, and laud it or assault it, usually in ad hominem terms. Such acts are impulsive, not thoughtful. I’m not like that in daily life. Why would I choose to behave so childishly, and with so little respect for myself and others, in the digital world?   

Sunday morning I was sitting on the couch in our front room reading a collection of Max Beerbohm’s essays. The rain had stopped and through the bay window I could watch two fathers in the cul-de-sac playing catch with their sons. I’ve never played catch with anyone, including my father and my three sons, and no one seems the worse from my negligence. I’ve read and reread Beerbohm for many years and find that his essays have grown increasingly compatible with the person I have somehow become. In “Going Out for a Walk” he writes: “Walking for walking’s sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the brain.” That is true for me as well, and the same might be said for playing catch. Beerbohm winningly refers to “walkmongers.”

Thieke’s real subject is bookstores and she lists thirty of the best, only one of which I have visited. I associate the best bookstores with good conversation, with the owner or fellow patrons, a pleasure grown increasingly rare. I also associate the best bookstores with the most essential of our inalienable rights: the right to be left alone. No high-pressure tactics, no hard sell, no clerks helpless without a computer. Just a man alone in a room, quietly looking at books, a solitary act that places us in the company of millions. Thieke writes:  

“A fine bookstore makes a home for the great forgotten virtue: attention. It is not subjected to the whim of stockholders and committees, eager to dump stock in favor of digital innovations. It is curated, but not minimalist. There is texture, there is age, there is the joy that comes of having known something for more than a season.”

[Thanks go to Mark Marowitz for alerting me to Thieke’s essay and many others.]