Sphere Of Influence

Attention is a word used by Simone Weil to describe the constantly renewed attempt to see things, objects, people, moral situations, truly as they are, uncoloured by our own personal fantasies or needs for consolation. Attention is in this sense a willed, thoughtful, selfless contemplation: Simone Weil remarks that those who ATTEND properly to life make their moral decisions in terms of what their attention has made of them. They are not free to make random leaps of faith or violence; the freedom was in the choice of attending in the first place.

—A. S. Byatt from Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch