It was Francis Bacon, the statesman and theorist of science, whose Essayes, published in 1597, introduced the concept into English prose. Bacon borrowed the term from Michel de Montaigne, whose first book of Essais had been published in France seventeen years earlier. Like Seneca, Montaigne wrote in a personal vein, but what set him apart was that he investigated himself in a manner at once curious, rigorous, skeptical and intimate. In France, an essayeur was an official who tested coins or grain for purity and value. Montaigne tested the meaning and value of the random movements of his mind.
In our own time, Meghan O’Gieblyn is among the very best essayists we have. When we read her work, we come to understand her in part through her acts of self-discovery, how, not unlike Montaigne, she comes to know herself by reckoning with the ways in which she may have remained unknown to herself. But there’s more to it than that. Rather than offer assurances about the world or herself, O’Gieblyn explores the dimensions of her curiosity, imagination and doubt with nimble, gracious prose. Readers of this magazine have known that for some time. In “Hell” (issue 9) O’Gieblyn traces her loss of Christian faith to her dissatisfaction with the answers on offer to the problem of damnation; and in “The Insane Idea” (issue 11), she considers how deep-seated attitudes toward addiction, which Aristotle once called the “irrational passions,” can lead someone into an existential cul-de-sac, if not a hell, of self-help. O’Gieblyn has tested issues like religion and the limits of self-knowledge in her debut collection Interior States (2018), a series of essays on faith and life in the Midwest; God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021), a rigorous exploration of our obsession with technology; and her newest book, Will and Attention: A Memoir, out from Doubleday this week—yet never the same way twice. To read O’Gieblyn’s work is to understand in an intimate way how a writer alive to her own contradictions is a writer alive to those of the world.
—John Palattella
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John Palattella: The introduction to Will and Attention concludes with a chastening admission: the kind of autobiography you have written in your previous books is bogus. What’s more, you go on to declare that “autobiography is, or should be, an impossible form.” Yet here we are, talking about a new autobiography, your second. What gives?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: Yes, I’ve written a lot of personal writing that loosely fits into the category of autobiography. But this is really my first straightforward memoir. Throughout the writing process, I was contending with the limits of autobiography: Can you ever really know yourself well enough to tell your story? What are your motives for doing so? Is autobiography another form of self-deception or a way to try to convince yourself of something that only part of yourself believes? There’s a formal problem with autobiography, too, which is that you are claiming to tell the story of your life while you are still inside of it. You’re trying to create an arc for something that is still ongoing. Augustine came up with a solution to this problem in his Confessions, which was to die and then continue to live. Renounce your old life and be “born again.” Doing so allows you to inhabit this fictional perspective of an afterlife where you are on another plane and can talk about your life as a whole. That narrative distance, that illusion of projecting yourself out of your life, was something I had become deeply skeptical of.
I was writing this book in the wake of having come back from a relapse after over a decade of sobriety. During those eleven years, I had often told my story from a podium in church basements, according to the usual formula: I was lost and now I’m found. This narrative form is embedded in the Christian form of testimony, as well as in many contemporary memoirs and personal essays. This book was an attempt to try to find my way out of that form from within it, if that makes sense. I felt the need to tell my story, and to do so in public, where I’m held accountable by the moral gaze of another person—but at the same time not to reduce it, or simplify it. I became really interested in the fact that a lot of testimonies, especially the Christian conversion narratives of seventeenth century Protestants, are often very circular. They are about somebody who keeps coming to God and then regressing, going back to their old life, and then returning to faith. I really identified with this idea that you’re constantly having to learn the same lessons over again, after forgetting them. I do hope there is something redemptive or generative about that cycle, that eventually you can get closer to the truth somehow. But in most cases, it’s a long, nonlinear journey.
JP: While you were writing the manuscript were you ever tempted to abandon that approach? Were you frustrated at all with trying to account for things in ways that the experiences and processes you’ve just described did not allow?
MO: The whole thing felt impossible from the start until almost the end of it. I’d become really skeptical of narrative distance and also narrative authority, the notion that I could say anything definitive about what my motives were, or why I was drawn to writing. I think at some point I decided that the book was going to be an argument with myself.
So much of the book is about this idea of having a divided self or experiencing a sort of doubleness within. Well, this is the great thing about writing memoirs: you can create a dialogue with yourself. You can create a space where that conversation can be fruitful, where both parts of you, or multiple parts, can have their say. I think I started to see that dialogue as a source of intellectual tension, as opposed to allowing the momentum of the book to be carried by a traditional plot, or the expectation of “what’s going to happen.” My story, on its own, is not remarkable in any way. It follows the standard arc of a recovery memoir. The thing that interested me was not the outcome of my personal journey but the tensions that I was trying to resolve internally. In the second half of the book, especially, those ideas are allowed to take center stage, alongside all the texts and writers that contributed to my thinking.
JP: Early in Will and Attention you write, “I know a lot of things in theory, and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.” You also admit, “I don’t know how to pay attention.” Okay, I get that, given some of the crash-and-burn stories about your life told in the book. How, then, did you summon the attention that needed to be summoned to write a book called Will and Attention?
MO: I don’t know if I say this in the book, but writing is the only way I know how to pay attention. That’s the whole reason I wanted to write this book: I wanted to commit myself, for a couple of years, to paying attention. Writing creates a space where you can start to pin down all these thoughts that are constantly flitting through your head, going nowhere, with no forward momentum. I think the book was an opportunity for me to think more deeply and at length about the series of problems that had led to my relapse—among them, the fact that I continued to subscribe to the standard recovery narrative while part of me really didn’t believe in it. I had all these half-acknowledged misgivings about finding a higher power and surrendering when we live in a world that’s beset by the problem of evil. All of that had been lurking in the background of my life for years. And I think that to some extent my failure to stay sober was a failure of attention; I didn’t give my mind fully to those problems. I felt that it was just a convenient narrative that I was using to live and didn’t really reconcile the contradictions in myself. I think the book was an attempt to try to reach some sort of resolution or agreement—which is not to say that I found any answers…
JP: I like that aspect of the book. It makes no false promises.
MO: It’s funny because when you’re writing a book, you have to delude yourself into thinking that you’re going to find a solution, that there will be some answer at the end of it. But I think the resolution is often about transcending the problem, or maybe making something beautiful out of the struggle, which puts those questions to rest. That’s how it is for me, at least.
JP: Early in the book, in a passing mention of Socrates, you declare that the Greeks’ belief “that virtue is simply knowledge, that if you know what good is that you would automatically do it” is totally alien to you. Is knowledge then a sort of know-nothingism?
MO: I think I was trying to make a distinction between intellectual knowledge and the kind of deep understanding that leads you to act in a certain way. This problem arose out of my own experience before I began to think about it in philosophical terms, and it was this experience that I think most people have at some point: I know that I shouldn’t be eating this brownie or shouldn’t be staying up this late or I shouldn’t be fantasizing about drinking, but I can’t stop myself from doing it. There is a superficial way to read that Socrates quote you mentioned, from Protagoras, which is: okay, once you know something is good, you should just do it, no question. But I think some of the Greek philosophers were talking about this deeper sense of self-knowledge: if you say something is good, but you keep choosing the opposite, then some part of you doesn’t really believe that it’s good. I was interested in how one form of knowledge moves to the other form of knowledge, the knowledge that you can assent to in theory versus the things that you are actively choosing, your “revealed” preferences as opposed to your stated preferences. What does the deepest part of you believe, your unconscious, that you’re not willing to admit?
JP: Let’s go back to the book’s title. “Will” is an old word. It comes to us from the Old English wille, from before the twelfth century, and further back the Latin velle, to wish or to want. It is something internal. “Attention” is also an old word, its first known use dating to the fourteenth century. It comes to us from Middle English—attencioun—and the Latin attendere: to attend to or stretch toward the world. When did you become conscious of wanting to put those two concepts in dialogue, to attend to the tension between them? That is, how did the philosophical thread of the narrative come about?
MO: It’s really from this one passage in Simone Weil’s diaries: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” And from passages scattered throughout her notebooks about those two concepts. Before reading her, I had never seen or even thought about those two words, will and attention, in relationship to one another. I was initially struck by her assertion that we can’t cure our faults by willpower because I encountered it at a moment when I was acutely aware that the will was not effective in the realm of inner change, or maybe even counterproductive. This went beyond the question of addiction. It wasn’t just drinking, it was virtually every sort of spiritual failing that I’d tried to address in my life. In some cases, it feels like the harder you work on those problems, the more likely you are to fail. It’s almost like you’re getting in your own way.
This is something that William James wrote about, how sometimes relaxing, or surrendering, is a way through when effort fails. I had always thought about will versus surrender, or will versus grace. That’s how it’s often framed in the Christian tradition in which I was raised. Attention is not something that I had thought about before in this context. And as somebody who was on a path and strayed from it, more than once—with my recovery, and when I left my Christian faith—I was thinking a lot about what it means to follow through on a commitment, what it means to continue to believe something, even in the trenches of everyday life, when things get really difficult. I had long assumed those were failures of willpower; I didn’t persevere long enough. But then I began to think about whether those were actually failures of attention.
I was interested in Weil’s notion of attention because it’s not at all what we usually think of as attention, at least in popular discourse. People tend to talk about attention as focus, which is tied to productivity, and is very pragmatic, very instrumentalist. There’s this idea that you are clenched, zeroing in on one thing. Weil’s notion of attention is almost the opposite. The word attention in French is cognate with “waiting.” She talks about attention as remaining patiently on the doorstep of truth. When you think about attention as waiting, it becomes the opposite of will. You’re not striving to get up the mountain on your own; you are just waiting, listening, looking at your life, watching your thought processes. I think that is the path of attention.
JP: It invokes a sense of if not stillness, an active stillness: you are not dormant. You’re very much awake yet calm, hoping that something might arise.
MO: Yes, that’s part of it too: waiting, but not falling asleep. I became really interested in the writings of some of the early Church fathers, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. There was a lot of discussion about attention as a form of sobriety. In fact, the word for attention in Greek is nepsis, and it means literally I do not drink wine. So there’s the sense that drunkenness and sleep is one way of going through life, remaining oblivious to your life and your thoughts. Then there’s the idea of sobriety or watchfulness. I think about all the passages in the New Testament where Christ speaks about the importance of remaining awake. He’s always warning his disciples to be watchful and vigilant: do not slumber. And it’s something that you encounter in Eastern traditions too, that enlightenment is a form of wakefulness.
JP: While I was reading, I kept wondering if Samuel Beckett’s ghost was going to shuffle onto the stage, muttering “fail better, fail better.” But he never appears. Simone Weil, however, as you have already explained, does. In some ways an aphorist like Beckett, she was also, as you write, “prone to hyperbole,” and has “become known, for better or for worse, for some of her most severe proclamations.” It seems that working on this book allowed you not only to rediscover Weil, and to enjoy her uncommon intellectual and spiritual company, but also to rediscover a sense of selfhood as well as put behind you a period of metaphysical boredom—what, as you remind us, medieval monks called acedia. At what point in the writing, and why, did you decide to bring in Weil? And were their times that you lost patience with her?
MO: She was the starting point for the book. In fact, I had initially conceived of the book as more of a bibliomemoir, engaging primarily with her work and drawing on my life only glancingly, through anecdotes. I got some feedback early on from an editor that we need “less Simone and more Meghan.” It was good advice. I still feel a bit ambivalent about how personal the book became. It is much more of a straightforward memoir that what I had intended. But I do think there were certain things in my life I was evading by using Weil’s work as a screen. And I really came to understand her by putting her in conversation with my own experience. My book about Weil is going to be different from anyone else’s because I’m focusing on a very limited portion of her work, but it’s the part that was speaking to me during this particular time of my life.
I did become frustrated with her. Part of what was interesting to me about her, and also a bit unnerving, was the fact that she was able to write so eloquently and so precisely, and with a seeming wisdom, about problems that, according to her biographies, she did not really transcend in her own life. She wrote constantly about the futility of the will and was, by all accounts, the most willful person who ever walked the planet. She battled with herself throughout her life, even after her turn to Christianity. She’s one of many writers I’ve been drawn to over the years who did not ultimately overcome their own demons or take their own prescriptions. It goes back to the paradox of knowing something versus really knowing it. I’m interested in people who are immersed in the struggle to the point where they can articulate it better than anybody. And that’s not always the same person who’s made it to the other side.
Weil understood the psychology of internal battles better than any writer I’ve encountered. And she glimpsed a way out—this way of attention, the mode of grace—even if she only experienced flashes of it. I don’t know if anybody can reach that place of total self-reconciliation. I certainly haven’t. But I do believe that there is truth in what she wrote.
JP: Your book’s narrative is structured as a chronicle of lapses, recriminations, failures, second thoughts: a brief return to religion—Catholicism—after having abandoned evangelical Christianity in your early twenties; an extended return to drinking after having been sober for more than a decade; and then, after getting sober again, a return to stable relations with family and friends, accompanied by a desire to no longer test fate. All of that is narrated in spare, graceful prose. It is knitted together beautifully, yet each piece is also its own thing. What was it like trying to find a narrative voice and a style that could accommodate the variety of all that?
MO: I struggled so much with the voice of this book. Especially the first chapters, which I rewrote many, many, many times. There’s always this problem, at the start, where you have to find the part of yourself that’s capable of telling this particular story. When things are going well, it feels like I’m just writing in the only voice that I have—but that’s rare, and it usually emerges once you’ve gained some momentum on a project. It’s funny because I was writing about the multiplicity of the self, and there were times when I felt like different parts of me took over. I wrote one early draft that felt like it was written in the voice of my alcoholism. It was just terrible. Very dark. It was romanticizing the drinking. I was able to say things in that voice that were true, things that I hadn’t allowed myself to say before. But then I had to rewrite it because there was also a lot of self-deception in that voice. It was a process of writing and rewriting, allowing my lower impulses to have a voice and then trying to revise so as to weed out the untruths. At some point, I think it was probably the halfway point of the book, I stopped thinking about voice so much. But it was definitely an interesting process, with much more variety in terms of voice and style than my other writings.
JP: Your previous book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, is a sharp rebuttal of what you call a bankrupt “philosophy of selfhood that has characterized information technologies since the early days of cybernetics—the notion that a person can be described purely in terms of pattern and probabilities, without any concern for interiority.” Have any questions about personhood that went unanswered in that book spilled over into Will and Attention or assumed a new form?
MO: In some ways this book was about the behind-the-scenes motives that led me to write God, Human, Animal, Machine. I included personal experience in that book too, about my loss of faith and certain theological doctrines I struggled with, but most of the autobiographical passages from that book were drawn from my past. The more fundamental reason I was drawn to think about technology, consciousness and the mind was this personal conviction that the self is a mystery. What if it’s true that it doesn’t exist? What if we are these ongoing patterns of information, and the control that we think we have over our minds is an illusion? I was writing about technology but experiencing it as a spiritual problem, at a moment when I was totally baffled and bewildered by my own motives. This notion that the self is an illusion, and that thinking is just noise, and it’s your actions that count, is obviously very popular now, not only because of the rise of technologies that emulate human intelligence without any sort of internal experience, but also because of the long legacy of behaviorism. I’d started to dismiss my own inner life, somehow, almost unconsciously, because it is just the water in which we swim.
But there are real costs to discounting the mind and what happens there. There’s a saying that you hear a lot in recovery circles, that taking a drink is the last step in a relapse. Everything that takes place before that happens in your mind—indulging in fantasies, questioning certain ideas that you know are true from experience. That’s precisely what happened with me. This is something else that the early Church fathers wrote about. When you get to a point where you’re faced with temptation, the battle is already over. You have already led yourself to a point where succumbing to temptation is inevitable. The solution in a lot of spiritual traditions is to pay close attention to your mind, “guarding your heart,” as it’s sometimes called. What I came to realize is that there are very few practices or frameworks in contemporary life that advise that kind of self-interrogation. Everything in our world is trying to distract us from doing that work, and to me that is ultimately where everything starts. This is something that Iris Murdoch stresses in her interpretation of Weil’s writing on will and attention. We tend to think of the will as radically isolated and free to choose anything at any moment. But willpower is often useless in the moment when you are faced with a choice or a temptation. You’ve already become the person who is capable of making one decision. Our ability to act well depends on what we can see, and attention is the daily work of conditioning our minds to see a more expansive picture of reality, one that is not clouded by self-interest. I can’t give a philosophical defense of the fact that we do have a real inner life, but I’ve seen the evidence in my own life of what happens when I attend to it and what happens when I don’t.
JP: Would it be fair to say that the argument of your new book, more so than your previous ones, depends upon a refusal of romance? I’m thinking of a remark you make about epiphanies: the beauty and value of the ephemeral is ruined by attempting to preserve it. In other words, mystery should not be confused with mastery?
MO: I was thinking in that passage about the ways that religion and ideology—religion in its most doctrinaire forms—tries to take these little glimpses of truth we see in our life, and then to codify it into a bunch of rules and dogma. Murdoch called them “sparks,” a certain spark of insight into what life means, or the beauty that lies beyond this world. There are all kinds of ways, beyond religion, that we try to artificially preserve those moments of grace; drinking for me was one of them. Drinking is basically the belief that you can bottle grace, that you can be happy constantly. Maybe the romanticism the book is rejecting is the sense of finality or completion, the notion that we can reach a state of wholeness or that we can overcome ourselves definitively. Maybe it’s a rejection of the very idea of enlightenment or salvation, in favor of the ongoing struggle to achieve a state where you can receive those sparks when they happen.
JP: To what extent do you think that wonder, which is a kind of grace, depends on humility, which can allow us to fall in love with the world? I’m thinking of an episode late in Will and Attention, my favorite in the book. You and your husband are staying in a seaside town on the Ligurian coast. While walking one evening you come upon a grotto where young boys and girls, most of them Italian, grapple their way up a cliff, gather at the ledge, and then dive one by one into a small pool of water rimmed with jagged rocks. You join the crowd watching the divers; you are terrified, spellbound, amazed. Did the divers instill in you a craving for something other than diving, a kind of composed wonder?
MO: That week that my husband and I spent on the Ligurian coast happened about a year before I would start writing the book. I was struck by the scene of the divers and I wrote a detailed description of it that week, while we were there in Italy. I did not have any sense of what it meant or why it had struck me. But I was thinking about it a lot later, when I was writing the book. I hate to reduce it to symbolism, but the impulse to include it in the book, I think, stemmed from the sense that the divers were enacting the human will, the impulse to test fate, to assert oneself, to challenge oneself, or nature. Throughout the book the will is the villain in the narrative, the thing I was trying to escape. But there was something so beautiful and so human about watching people dive—and the miracle of watching them resurface too, which felt like an element of grace. I had reached a point of my life, maybe the onset of middle age and having come back from all of my own misadventures with testing fate, where I sensed I was moving on to a new phase of life, to a place where you can just sit and watch, and don’t have to always try to prove yourself or engage in those reckless acts. I certainly have felt those urges less as I enter midlife. To some extent, I think genuine attention is only possible when you’re not trying to manipulate the world. There is a sense of quietness where you can actually experience those moments of wonder.
For me, will is all about grasping and preserving. Maybe accepting the ephemeral allows for attention in some way? Whenever somebody talks about wonder I think of how it’s become this awful pop-psychology buzzword, where there are podcasts or articles that promise: “five ways to experience more wonder in your life.” It’s a self-defeating paradox. You cannot try to get wonder or get grace; it’s one of those things that you almost have to stop looking for in order to experience. Sometimes when you are completely in despair about life or have given up on something, then all of a sudden you have this transcendent moment, an experience of beauty or an absence of self-consciousness. I think I entered into that kind of state as I was watching those divers, watching without any end in mind, wanting to write about it without even knowing why I wanted to write about it. It seemed to capture something bigger than my intent.
Image credit: An Mai (Flickr / CC-BY-SA 2.0)
It was Francis Bacon, the statesman and theorist of science, whose Essayes, published in 1597, introduced the concept into English prose. Bacon borrowed the term from Michel de Montaigne, whose first book of Essais had been published in France seventeen years earlier. Like Seneca, Montaigne wrote in a personal vein, but what set him apart was that he investigated himself in a manner at once curious, rigorous, skeptical and intimate. In France, an essayeur was an official who tested coins or grain for purity and value. Montaigne tested the meaning and value of the random movements of his mind.
In our own time, Meghan O’Gieblyn is among the very best essayists we have. When we read her work, we come to understand her in part through her acts of self-discovery, how, not unlike Montaigne, she comes to know herself by reckoning with the ways in which she may have remained unknown to herself. But there’s more to it than that. Rather than offer assurances about the world or herself, O’Gieblyn explores the dimensions of her curiosity, imagination and doubt with nimble, gracious prose. Readers of this magazine have known that for some time. In “Hell” (issue 9) O’Gieblyn traces her loss of Christian faith to her dissatisfaction with the answers on offer to the problem of damnation; and in “The Insane Idea” (issue 11), she considers how deep-seated attitudes toward addiction, which Aristotle once called the “irrational passions,” can lead someone into an existential cul-de-sac, if not a hell, of self-help. O’Gieblyn has tested issues like religion and the limits of self-knowledge in her debut collection Interior States (2018), a series of essays on faith and life in the Midwest; God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021), a rigorous exploration of our obsession with technology; and her newest book, Will and Attention: A Memoir, out from Doubleday this week—yet never the same way twice. To read O’Gieblyn’s work is to understand in an intimate way how a writer alive to her own contradictions is a writer alive to those of the world.
—John Palattella
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John Palattella: The introduction to Will and Attention concludes with a chastening admission: the kind of autobiography you have written in your previous books is bogus. What’s more, you go on to declare that “autobiography is, or should be, an impossible form.” Yet here we are, talking about a new autobiography, your second. What gives?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: Yes, I’ve written a lot of personal writing that loosely fits into the category of autobiography. But this is really my first straightforward memoir. Throughout the writing process, I was contending with the limits of autobiography: Can you ever really know yourself well enough to tell your story? What are your motives for doing so? Is autobiography another form of self-deception or a way to try to convince yourself of something that only part of yourself believes? There’s a formal problem with autobiography, too, which is that you are claiming to tell the story of your life while you are still inside of it. You’re trying to create an arc for something that is still ongoing. Augustine came up with a solution to this problem in his Confessions, which was to die and then continue to live. Renounce your old life and be “born again.” Doing so allows you to inhabit this fictional perspective of an afterlife where you are on another plane and can talk about your life as a whole. That narrative distance, that illusion of projecting yourself out of your life, was something I had become deeply skeptical of.
I was writing this book in the wake of having come back from a relapse after over a decade of sobriety. During those eleven years, I had often told my story from a podium in church basements, according to the usual formula: I was lost and now I’m found. This narrative form is embedded in the Christian form of testimony, as well as in many contemporary memoirs and personal essays. This book was an attempt to try to find my way out of that form from within it, if that makes sense. I felt the need to tell my story, and to do so in public, where I’m held accountable by the moral gaze of another person—but at the same time not to reduce it, or simplify it. I became really interested in the fact that a lot of testimonies, especially the Christian conversion narratives of seventeenth century Protestants, are often very circular. They are about somebody who keeps coming to God and then regressing, going back to their old life, and then returning to faith. I really identified with this idea that you’re constantly having to learn the same lessons over again, after forgetting them. I do hope there is something redemptive or generative about that cycle, that eventually you can get closer to the truth somehow. But in most cases, it’s a long, nonlinear journey.
JP: While you were writing the manuscript were you ever tempted to abandon that approach? Were you frustrated at all with trying to account for things in ways that the experiences and processes you’ve just described did not allow?
MO: The whole thing felt impossible from the start until almost the end of it. I’d become really skeptical of narrative distance and also narrative authority, the notion that I could say anything definitive about what my motives were, or why I was drawn to writing. I think at some point I decided that the book was going to be an argument with myself.
So much of the book is about this idea of having a divided self or experiencing a sort of doubleness within. Well, this is the great thing about writing memoirs: you can create a dialogue with yourself. You can create a space where that conversation can be fruitful, where both parts of you, or multiple parts, can have their say. I think I started to see that dialogue as a source of intellectual tension, as opposed to allowing the momentum of the book to be carried by a traditional plot, or the expectation of “what’s going to happen.” My story, on its own, is not remarkable in any way. It follows the standard arc of a recovery memoir. The thing that interested me was not the outcome of my personal journey but the tensions that I was trying to resolve internally. In the second half of the book, especially, those ideas are allowed to take center stage, alongside all the texts and writers that contributed to my thinking.
JP: Early in Will and Attention you write, “I know a lot of things in theory, and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.” You also admit, “I don’t know how to pay attention.” Okay, I get that, given some of the crash-and-burn stories about your life told in the book. How, then, did you summon the attention that needed to be summoned to write a book called Will and Attention?
MO: I don’t know if I say this in the book, but writing is the only way I know how to pay attention. That’s the whole reason I wanted to write this book: I wanted to commit myself, for a couple of years, to paying attention. Writing creates a space where you can start to pin down all these thoughts that are constantly flitting through your head, going nowhere, with no forward momentum. I think the book was an opportunity for me to think more deeply and at length about the series of problems that had led to my relapse—among them, the fact that I continued to subscribe to the standard recovery narrative while part of me really didn’t believe in it. I had all these half-acknowledged misgivings about finding a higher power and surrendering when we live in a world that’s beset by the problem of evil. All of that had been lurking in the background of my life for years. And I think that to some extent my failure to stay sober was a failure of attention; I didn’t give my mind fully to those problems. I felt that it was just a convenient narrative that I was using to live and didn’t really reconcile the contradictions in myself. I think the book was an attempt to try to reach some sort of resolution or agreement—which is not to say that I found any answers…
JP: I like that aspect of the book. It makes no false promises.
MO: It’s funny because when you’re writing a book, you have to delude yourself into thinking that you’re going to find a solution, that there will be some answer at the end of it. But I think the resolution is often about transcending the problem, or maybe making something beautiful out of the struggle, which puts those questions to rest. That’s how it is for me, at least.
JP: Early in the book, in a passing mention of Socrates, you declare that the Greeks’ belief “that virtue is simply knowledge, that if you know what good is that you would automatically do it” is totally alien to you. Is knowledge then a sort of know-nothingism?
MO: I think I was trying to make a distinction between intellectual knowledge and the kind of deep understanding that leads you to act in a certain way. This problem arose out of my own experience before I began to think about it in philosophical terms, and it was this experience that I think most people have at some point: I know that I shouldn’t be eating this brownie or shouldn’t be staying up this late or I shouldn’t be fantasizing about drinking, but I can’t stop myself from doing it. There is a superficial way to read that Socrates quote you mentioned, from Protagoras, which is: okay, once you know something is good, you should just do it, no question. But I think some of the Greek philosophers were talking about this deeper sense of self-knowledge: if you say something is good, but you keep choosing the opposite, then some part of you doesn’t really believe that it’s good. I was interested in how one form of knowledge moves to the other form of knowledge, the knowledge that you can assent to in theory versus the things that you are actively choosing, your “revealed” preferences as opposed to your stated preferences. What does the deepest part of you believe, your unconscious, that you’re not willing to admit?
JP: Let’s go back to the book’s title. “Will” is an old word. It comes to us from the Old English wille, from before the twelfth century, and further back the Latin velle, to wish or to want. It is something internal. “Attention” is also an old word, its first known use dating to the fourteenth century. It comes to us from Middle English—attencioun—and the Latin attendere: to attend to or stretch toward the world. When did you become conscious of wanting to put those two concepts in dialogue, to attend to the tension between them? That is, how did the philosophical thread of the narrative come about?
MO: It’s really from this one passage in Simone Weil’s diaries: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” And from passages scattered throughout her notebooks about those two concepts. Before reading her, I had never seen or even thought about those two words, will and attention, in relationship to one another. I was initially struck by her assertion that we can’t cure our faults by willpower because I encountered it at a moment when I was acutely aware that the will was not effective in the realm of inner change, or maybe even counterproductive. This went beyond the question of addiction. It wasn’t just drinking, it was virtually every sort of spiritual failing that I’d tried to address in my life. In some cases, it feels like the harder you work on those problems, the more likely you are to fail. It’s almost like you’re getting in your own way.
This is something that William James wrote about, how sometimes relaxing, or surrendering, is a way through when effort fails. I had always thought about will versus surrender, or will versus grace. That’s how it’s often framed in the Christian tradition in which I was raised. Attention is not something that I had thought about before in this context. And as somebody who was on a path and strayed from it, more than once—with my recovery, and when I left my Christian faith—I was thinking a lot about what it means to follow through on a commitment, what it means to continue to believe something, even in the trenches of everyday life, when things get really difficult. I had long assumed those were failures of willpower; I didn’t persevere long enough. But then I began to think about whether those were actually failures of attention.
I was interested in Weil’s notion of attention because it’s not at all what we usually think of as attention, at least in popular discourse. People tend to talk about attention as focus, which is tied to productivity, and is very pragmatic, very instrumentalist. There’s this idea that you are clenched, zeroing in on one thing. Weil’s notion of attention is almost the opposite. The word attention in French is cognate with “waiting.” She talks about attention as remaining patiently on the doorstep of truth. When you think about attention as waiting, it becomes the opposite of will. You’re not striving to get up the mountain on your own; you are just waiting, listening, looking at your life, watching your thought processes. I think that is the path of attention.
JP: It invokes a sense of if not stillness, an active stillness: you are not dormant. You’re very much awake yet calm, hoping that something might arise.
MO: Yes, that’s part of it too: waiting, but not falling asleep. I became really interested in the writings of some of the early Church fathers, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. There was a lot of discussion about attention as a form of sobriety. In fact, the word for attention in Greek is nepsis, and it means literally I do not drink wine. So there’s the sense that drunkenness and sleep is one way of going through life, remaining oblivious to your life and your thoughts. Then there’s the idea of sobriety or watchfulness. I think about all the passages in the New Testament where Christ speaks about the importance of remaining awake. He’s always warning his disciples to be watchful and vigilant: do not slumber. And it’s something that you encounter in Eastern traditions too, that enlightenment is a form of wakefulness.
JP: While I was reading, I kept wondering if Samuel Beckett’s ghost was going to shuffle onto the stage, muttering “fail better, fail better.” But he never appears. Simone Weil, however, as you have already explained, does. In some ways an aphorist like Beckett, she was also, as you write, “prone to hyperbole,” and has “become known, for better or for worse, for some of her most severe proclamations.” It seems that working on this book allowed you not only to rediscover Weil, and to enjoy her uncommon intellectual and spiritual company, but also to rediscover a sense of selfhood as well as put behind you a period of metaphysical boredom—what, as you remind us, medieval monks called acedia. At what point in the writing, and why, did you decide to bring in Weil? And were their times that you lost patience with her?
MO: She was the starting point for the book. In fact, I had initially conceived of the book as more of a bibliomemoir, engaging primarily with her work and drawing on my life only glancingly, through anecdotes. I got some feedback early on from an editor that we need “less Simone and more Meghan.” It was good advice. I still feel a bit ambivalent about how personal the book became. It is much more of a straightforward memoir that what I had intended. But I do think there were certain things in my life I was evading by using Weil’s work as a screen. And I really came to understand her by putting her in conversation with my own experience. My book about Weil is going to be different from anyone else’s because I’m focusing on a very limited portion of her work, but it’s the part that was speaking to me during this particular time of my life.
I did become frustrated with her. Part of what was interesting to me about her, and also a bit unnerving, was the fact that she was able to write so eloquently and so precisely, and with a seeming wisdom, about problems that, according to her biographies, she did not really transcend in her own life. She wrote constantly about the futility of the will and was, by all accounts, the most willful person who ever walked the planet. She battled with herself throughout her life, even after her turn to Christianity. She’s one of many writers I’ve been drawn to over the years who did not ultimately overcome their own demons or take their own prescriptions. It goes back to the paradox of knowing something versus really knowing it. I’m interested in people who are immersed in the struggle to the point where they can articulate it better than anybody. And that’s not always the same person who’s made it to the other side.
Weil understood the psychology of internal battles better than any writer I’ve encountered. And she glimpsed a way out—this way of attention, the mode of grace—even if she only experienced flashes of it. I don’t know if anybody can reach that place of total self-reconciliation. I certainly haven’t. But I do believe that there is truth in what she wrote.
JP: Your book’s narrative is structured as a chronicle of lapses, recriminations, failures, second thoughts: a brief return to religion—Catholicism—after having abandoned evangelical Christianity in your early twenties; an extended return to drinking after having been sober for more than a decade; and then, after getting sober again, a return to stable relations with family and friends, accompanied by a desire to no longer test fate. All of that is narrated in spare, graceful prose. It is knitted together beautifully, yet each piece is also its own thing. What was it like trying to find a narrative voice and a style that could accommodate the variety of all that?
MO: I struggled so much with the voice of this book. Especially the first chapters, which I rewrote many, many, many times. There’s always this problem, at the start, where you have to find the part of yourself that’s capable of telling this particular story. When things are going well, it feels like I’m just writing in the only voice that I have—but that’s rare, and it usually emerges once you’ve gained some momentum on a project. It’s funny because I was writing about the multiplicity of the self, and there were times when I felt like different parts of me took over. I wrote one early draft that felt like it was written in the voice of my alcoholism. It was just terrible. Very dark. It was romanticizing the drinking. I was able to say things in that voice that were true, things that I hadn’t allowed myself to say before. But then I had to rewrite it because there was also a lot of self-deception in that voice. It was a process of writing and rewriting, allowing my lower impulses to have a voice and then trying to revise so as to weed out the untruths. At some point, I think it was probably the halfway point of the book, I stopped thinking about voice so much. But it was definitely an interesting process, with much more variety in terms of voice and style than my other writings.
JP: Your previous book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, is a sharp rebuttal of what you call a bankrupt “philosophy of selfhood that has characterized information technologies since the early days of cybernetics—the notion that a person can be described purely in terms of pattern and probabilities, without any concern for interiority.” Have any questions about personhood that went unanswered in that book spilled over into Will and Attention or assumed a new form?
MO: In some ways this book was about the behind-the-scenes motives that led me to write God, Human, Animal, Machine. I included personal experience in that book too, about my loss of faith and certain theological doctrines I struggled with, but most of the autobiographical passages from that book were drawn from my past. The more fundamental reason I was drawn to think about technology, consciousness and the mind was this personal conviction that the self is a mystery. What if it’s true that it doesn’t exist? What if we are these ongoing patterns of information, and the control that we think we have over our minds is an illusion? I was writing about technology but experiencing it as a spiritual problem, at a moment when I was totally baffled and bewildered by my own motives. This notion that the self is an illusion, and that thinking is just noise, and it’s your actions that count, is obviously very popular now, not only because of the rise of technologies that emulate human intelligence without any sort of internal experience, but also because of the long legacy of behaviorism. I’d started to dismiss my own inner life, somehow, almost unconsciously, because it is just the water in which we swim.
But there are real costs to discounting the mind and what happens there. There’s a saying that you hear a lot in recovery circles, that taking a drink is the last step in a relapse. Everything that takes place before that happens in your mind—indulging in fantasies, questioning certain ideas that you know are true from experience. That’s precisely what happened with me. This is something else that the early Church fathers wrote about. When you get to a point where you’re faced with temptation, the battle is already over. You have already led yourself to a point where succumbing to temptation is inevitable. The solution in a lot of spiritual traditions is to pay close attention to your mind, “guarding your heart,” as it’s sometimes called. What I came to realize is that there are very few practices or frameworks in contemporary life that advise that kind of self-interrogation. Everything in our world is trying to distract us from doing that work, and to me that is ultimately where everything starts. This is something that Iris Murdoch stresses in her interpretation of Weil’s writing on will and attention. We tend to think of the will as radically isolated and free to choose anything at any moment. But willpower is often useless in the moment when you are faced with a choice or a temptation. You’ve already become the person who is capable of making one decision. Our ability to act well depends on what we can see, and attention is the daily work of conditioning our minds to see a more expansive picture of reality, one that is not clouded by self-interest. I can’t give a philosophical defense of the fact that we do have a real inner life, but I’ve seen the evidence in my own life of what happens when I attend to it and what happens when I don’t.
JP: Would it be fair to say that the argument of your new book, more so than your previous ones, depends upon a refusal of romance? I’m thinking of a remark you make about epiphanies: the beauty and value of the ephemeral is ruined by attempting to preserve it. In other words, mystery should not be confused with mastery?
MO: I was thinking in that passage about the ways that religion and ideology—religion in its most doctrinaire forms—tries to take these little glimpses of truth we see in our life, and then to codify it into a bunch of rules and dogma. Murdoch called them “sparks,” a certain spark of insight into what life means, or the beauty that lies beyond this world. There are all kinds of ways, beyond religion, that we try to artificially preserve those moments of grace; drinking for me was one of them. Drinking is basically the belief that you can bottle grace, that you can be happy constantly. Maybe the romanticism the book is rejecting is the sense of finality or completion, the notion that we can reach a state of wholeness or that we can overcome ourselves definitively. Maybe it’s a rejection of the very idea of enlightenment or salvation, in favor of the ongoing struggle to achieve a state where you can receive those sparks when they happen.
JP: To what extent do you think that wonder, which is a kind of grace, depends on humility, which can allow us to fall in love with the world? I’m thinking of an episode late in Will and Attention, my favorite in the book. You and your husband are staying in a seaside town on the Ligurian coast. While walking one evening you come upon a grotto where young boys and girls, most of them Italian, grapple their way up a cliff, gather at the ledge, and then dive one by one into a small pool of water rimmed with jagged rocks. You join the crowd watching the divers; you are terrified, spellbound, amazed. Did the divers instill in you a craving for something other than diving, a kind of composed wonder?
MO: That week that my husband and I spent on the Ligurian coast happened about a year before I would start writing the book. I was struck by the scene of the divers and I wrote a detailed description of it that week, while we were there in Italy. I did not have any sense of what it meant or why it had struck me. But I was thinking about it a lot later, when I was writing the book. I hate to reduce it to symbolism, but the impulse to include it in the book, I think, stemmed from the sense that the divers were enacting the human will, the impulse to test fate, to assert oneself, to challenge oneself, or nature. Throughout the book the will is the villain in the narrative, the thing I was trying to escape. But there was something so beautiful and so human about watching people dive—and the miracle of watching them resurface too, which felt like an element of grace. I had reached a point of my life, maybe the onset of middle age and having come back from all of my own misadventures with testing fate, where I sensed I was moving on to a new phase of life, to a place where you can just sit and watch, and don’t have to always try to prove yourself or engage in those reckless acts. I certainly have felt those urges less as I enter midlife. To some extent, I think genuine attention is only possible when you’re not trying to manipulate the world. There is a sense of quietness where you can actually experience those moments of wonder.
For me, will is all about grasping and preserving. Maybe accepting the ephemeral allows for attention in some way? Whenever somebody talks about wonder I think of how it’s become this awful pop-psychology buzzword, where there are podcasts or articles that promise: “five ways to experience more wonder in your life.” It’s a self-defeating paradox. You cannot try to get wonder or get grace; it’s one of those things that you almost have to stop looking for in order to experience. Sometimes when you are completely in despair about life or have given up on something, then all of a sudden you have this transcendent moment, an experience of beauty or an absence of self-consciousness. I think I entered into that kind of state as I was watching those divers, watching without any end in mind, wanting to write about it without even knowing why I wanted to write about it. It seemed to capture something bigger than my intent.
Image credit: An Mai (Flickr / CC-BY-SA 2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.