a note№ 055
Cut the list to three items this morning and finished all three by noon, which has never once happened with a list of nine. The nine were never a plan. They were a way of feeling busy about deciding.
#attention
a seed№ 035
An inbox is a portrait of what other people want. A notebook is a portrait of what you want. Keep the second one longer.
a quotation№ 025
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
a quotation№ 024
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
a note№ 017
Borrowed a book and found a stranger’s pencil in the margins, arguing with chapter four. I finished the chapter twice: once for the author, once for whoever had been so patiently annoyed by him.
a note№ 013
Sat with one lamp on and the window uncovered, which makes the room feel smaller and the evening feel larger. Painters knew this. A single source of light does not merely illuminate a scene; it decides what the scene is about.
an essay№ 009
On reading slowly
For a while I measured reading in books per year, which is a little like measuring travel in airports. The number rose and my memory of the books did not, and eventually I had to admit that I had been collecting completions rather than ideas.
Slow reading fixed less than I hoped and more than I expected. The pages take longer, obviously. What surprised me is that the book begins to argue back. There is time for objection, and objection is where the reading actually happens; agreement, by contrast, leaves almost nothing behind.
So the tally is smaller now, and my notes are much larger. I can still tell you what I thought of a book from two years ago and where I think it was wrong, which I could not do when I was finishing thirty of them a year.
a note№ 004
Walked out in the cold without music for the first time in months. The town is much louder than I remembered, and much more interesting. I had been paying a small monthly fee in attention to avoid hearing it.